


Lightning Field

by commoncomitatus



Category: The New Legends of Monkey (TV)
Genre: Enemies to Friends, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Survival, Touch Aversion, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:34:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 161,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25133215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: Set between 1x03 and 1x04.  A reconciliation between pain, trauma, and two gods who are not quite as unalike as either of them thinks.
Relationships: Pigsy & Sandy (The New Legends of Monkey), Sandy & Tripitaka (The New Legends of Monkey)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 14





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A clumsy attempt to bridge a bit of the gap in Sandy and Pigsy's relationship, from the charged mistrust of their meeting in 1x03 ("I want to hear it from him...") to the slightly more relaxed, friend(ish)ly vibe we see later.
> 
> Also another look at potential experiences they may have shared pre-canon. Which... never ends well, apparently.
> 
> Warnings  
> TL;DR: this is a fic about trauma survival. Specifically, the difficult adjustment of having to work alongside someone who may have been a perpetrator of that trauma, and who, ultimately, may be somewhat traumatised themselves.
> 
> In more detail:  
> 1) PTSD, explored in great depth. Symptoms include but probably not limited to: trigger responses, dissociation, violent impulses, loss of control, invasive thoughts and memories, self-loathing and self-punishment.  
> 2) pre-canon Sandy and all the less-than pleasant content I usually explore with her (survival, dehumanisation and mistreatment, violence both endured and inflicted);  
> 3) pre-canon Pigsy, portrayed as both abuser (encouraging dehumanisation of and violence against others) and abused (enduring insults, emotional abuse, and threats).
> 
> Additional Content Notes: major injuries; drugs as a sedative / subjugation tool (as seen in canon); angst and pain, both physical and emotional, per my typical narrative wheelhouses.
> 
> That said, my usual long-and-angsty-fic disclaimer: Hopeful ending, with a start towards healing. Always.

***

It could become a problem.

If she let it, it could—

She won’t.

She’s too pragmatic, too practical.

Too experienced.

She’s spent her whole life in hiding. She knows better than anyone the dangers of exposing her weaknesses, of letting things become problems, of letting those problems be seen.

It is the difference between life and death, between a quick escape and a long recovery from wounds that would have killed someone less durable. It’s not just the way she lived, it’s the reason she’s still alive at all. Hiding in the shadows, in the sewers, in the dark spaces where no self-respecting creature would dare to go.

It’s all she knows, hiding. And she is very, very good at it.

She can hide this too.

Has to, if she wants to stay on the quest. If she wants them to let her stay.

She has to be pragmatic. She has to be practical. She has to keep hiding.

It won’t become a problem.

It—

No.

_He_.

Pigsy, who knew her before. 

Sandy, who knew him before too. What he was, what he did. The life he built for himself on the bones of others.

He taught her a lot of things, for someone who never spoke to her directly.

Those lessons...

No.

She won’t let them stick. She won’t let them lodge themselves inside her head. They’ve lived there long enough already; she won’t let them burrow in any deeper. She won’t let them overpower her, won’t let them take her, won’t let them consume her.

Not again.

Not ever, _ever_ —

He looks at her, and he doesn’t seem to see her at all.

He looks at her, and it’s no different to the way he looks at the others. Tripitaka and Monkey, human and god. He looks at Sandy like she could be either one of those things. Like he didn’t once call her something very, very different.

Like he didn’t—

He looks at her, like he looks at them, and he grins. Cool, careless, casual. A companion’s grin, perhaps even a friend’s. Like he can’t imagine, much less remember, a time when they were anything else.

Perhaps he can’t, at that.

He had so many enemies, so many opponents, so many victims. Perhaps she’s flattering herself, to imagine that she was special enough to stick in his head the way he’s stuck in hers.

She wishes she could shake it out. She wishes she could forget.

She hates that part of herself.

Hates a lot of parts, in truth, but that one cuts deeper than most. The things she forgets, and the things she doesn’t.

Her life, her past and present, even her own name: these things she forgets as easily as anything. They slip through the cracks in her head, vanished like a river emptying into the sea, and then it takes days to call them back. Her name and her life, her mind has decided, are unimportant, as are things like warmth and comfort and a full stomach. What it felt like to be loved, to be protected, to be cared for and wanted and cherished: these she is forced to forget.

Other things she remembers with absolute clarity, with such perfect, painful precision that they might as well be happening all over again.

And again and again and again.

The bite of a blade in her belly. The slick tang of blood in her mouth, its wet heat on her hands. The hatred in their eyes when hers caught the light and gave her away, the venom dripping off their tongues, as lethal as any weapon. The heaviness of their boots, the lightness of their bodies.

Those things stick.

Every minute, every hour, every second, they stick. Lodged inside her, taking root like the blade did, a knife old and blunt and useless; it made her sick, the rust boiling her blood like poison, until she yanked it out and claimed its power for herself.

If only she could claim power over her memories so easily.

The knife will do, though.

A token, a symbol, anointed in her blood and theirs. It took days to get it clean, she recalls. Wash off the blood, scrape off the rust, polish it and sharpen it. Make it clean, make it good.

She wonders how long it would take for him.

Pigsy: another blunt, useless thing, another weapon with rusted edges and cracks coated in blood.

How much polish would it take, she wonders, to make him good?

He wants to, or so he claims. Wants to make good his countless terrible deeds, wants to do right by the gods and humans he sent to their deaths.

Good intentions make a good start, Tripitaka tells them.

Sandy should at least have the patience to let Pigsy try.

She should—

She hides.

Keeps her thoughts locked up tight, her feelings tighter still. Keeps the knife in her hand, sharp and good and ready, even when she sleeps. Keeps one eye open all the time, and never lets them know where she’s looking.

It’s a comfort, being able to hide even out here, in daylight and moonlight and under the open skies. Being able to keep her soft parts guarded, even when they’re exposed. She wasn’t sure she would be able to do that.

It helps, she supposes, that they mostly ignore her.

_Mostly_.

Monkey doesn’t like her. He makes that very clear, so much and so often that she doesn’t even need the mark on her neck, the reminder of their tumultuous first meeting. He shows off his muscles, rolls his eyes, glares at her like she’s the source of every terrible thing that’s ever happened in the world, and on the rare occasion he speaks to her it’s with impatience dripping off his tongue.

He calls her ‘dead weight’, calls her ‘crazy’ — neither of which she could argue with, even if she had a mind to — and grouches endlessly to Tripitaka that they should never have let her join the quest.

He does all of this while knowing perfectly well that she can hear every word he’s saying.

Monkey is honest. Simple. He doesn’t like her, and he’s perfectly content to let her know it.

She appreciates that.

She lets him know it, too. When he scowls at her, all broodiness and irritation, she smiles blithely back, waves, and pretends they’re the best of friends. Plays with a niceness she doesn’t really possess, because she knows that it annoys him. It’s amusing, pushing his buttons and letting him push hers in return.

Not simply amusing: it’s predictable.

Sandy _really_ appreciates predictable.

She especially appreciates Monkey’s particular breed of predictable: frustration and aggravation, scowling and growling and ‘get away from me, you weirdo’ when she wasn’t anywhere near him.

These words, she’s known her whole life. ‘Weirdo’ and ‘crazy’ and ‘get away from me’. These she wears like clothes, like wounds burned so deep they may never scar. Like memories, the bittersweet kind that stick to her teeth.

It is a comfort, if something of a sad one, to find those things here too, out in the vast uncomfortable world, this place where everything is big and endless and she has to learn again how to walk over the ground and not under it.

She likes Monkey. Sincerely, she likes him a lot. Perhaps because he dislikes her, rather than in spite of it.

Pigsy doesn’t dislike her. She thinks perhaps that’s why it hurts: she feels so much, and he feels nothing at all.

As for Tripitaka...

Tripitaka, the monk with the holy name. She hopes he’ll never know how completely she owes him her life.

He looks at her sometimes, Tripitaka, and Sandy has no idea how to respond to the warmth she sees in him. His smile makes her insides melt, his eyes make her head lose what little reason it once held. Looking at him, she forgets who she is and what she was before.

He says her name like it’s made of spun sugar, and she thinks, _that can’t be me, it’s not supposed to sound like that, it never did before_. And she is frightened and she is awestruck and she—

She feels so much, so powerfully.

She has to keep it hidden.

And so she does.

She keeps her insides hidden from Tripitaka when he smiles and glows and speaks her name. She keeps her outsides hidden from Pigsy when he grins and leers and speaks his nonsense.

Neither of them would want to know the things she feels.

Tripitaka is so gentle, so kind. Two things Sandy doesn’t understand and can’t trust. He tries to include her sometimes, probably out of a sense of obligation, but mostly he just leaves her to herself. He asks questions, occasionally, about the things she learned from the Scholar — she is, after all, his only living tether to the great poet who saved both their souls — but she never knows what to say, and she has a feeling he probably regrets asking.

Pigsy looks at her sometimes like he wants to ask questions too. Less pleasant ones, she suspects, about darker, colder things. Memories she wants to forget and so, of course, never will.

She doesn’t know what stops him from asking. Not the look on her face, certainly: she has worked very, very hard to keep her emotions hidden, to not give away any trace of what she feels.

Her hands, perhaps.

The blade, the knife.

Perhaps he sees something reflected in its surface, a threat or a warning. Perhaps he’s simply afraid of its clean, good edge. Perhaps...

No matter. This she doesn’t hide.

She keeps the knife in her hands because it makes her feel safe.

Well. Safer.

It’s not the weapon she wants, but sometimes it’s the only one she can get away with keeping close.

Like now. Moments of so-called sanctuary, when they’re camped for the night and supposedly safe, when she has no choice but to lay down her scythe or risk the kind of questions she can’t answer.

When she can’t hold the big blade, the one that keeps her alive, she settles instead for the little one, the knife, small and sleek and stealthy. Crude, just like she is, but good at staying hidden too.

Gleaming, deadly, powerful; she pretends it’s in her hands only because it’s useful.

Tomorrow they will cross the border into the barren lands. Barren by name and by nature: no life, no people, no water. A dreadful place, and the first step in their quest.

Tonight, in preparation, they sit around a fire, resting and eating and arguing.

Or: Tripitaka argues with Monkey, Pigsy eats, and Sandy...

Sandy _tries_ to rest.

It’s not a concept she’s very familiar with.

It is difficult, adjusting to a world where it’s possible to do such a thing: to close her eyes, relax her body, and simply be. To sit in stillness and not be afraid of what might be lurking in the shadows.

It is doubly difficult knowing that _he_ is there, just a few short paces away, pretending he’s not staring at her shaking hands.

At the knife she’s holding.

She’s whittling a knot of wood, not out of any affinity for carving but simply to give herself something to do. To trick her mind and her body, always too active, into relaxing. To—

No.

An excuse, that’s all, to keep the knife in her hand.

To pretend it’s for the task.

To _hide_.

She keeps her eyes on the wood, her mind on the _swish_ of the blade as she works it over and over. Rhythmic, smooth, even. Each stroke perfectly measured, perfectly executed, a hundred little death-blows on an enemy already long dead. She keeps her other senses, all of them, carefully tuned to the world around her, and to her companions.

“It’s not my fault,” Monkey is grumbling. “They weren’t barren the last time I was here!”

Tripitaka, poring over one of the Scholar’s old maps, rolls his eyes.

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” he says, in a tone that makes it perfectly clear that yes, it does matter and yes, it is indeed Monkey’s fault. “Since you can’t summon your cloud, the only way through is the old-fashioned way: on foot.”

“Fun times,” Pigsy mutters, poking morosely at his plate. “That’s sarcasm, by the way.”

Sandy doesn’t flinch at the sound of his voice. She doesn’t flinch—

Yes, she does.

It cuts into her, his voice, a garotte tightening around her neck, squeezing until she can’t breathe.

It makes her think of Monkey’s staff, of the way the world went black as he crushed her throat. Such a strange feeling, she thought afterwards, to be almost killed by someone who didn’t end up dead themselves.

She’s not used to both parties surviving such violent encounters. She’s not used to having to keep track of which enemies aren’t enemies any more.

She’s not used to so many things.

Tripitaka, turning his annoyance on Pigsy, tsks his disapproval.

“We’ll just have to move quickly,” he says. “And hope we don’t run into too much trouble while we’re out there.”

Easier said than done, if the look on Pigsy’s face is anything to go by.

He would know, Sandy thinks. If she recalls correctly, he spent a great deal of time in the barren lands, running errands for Locke and negotiating with the demon sentinels who make their homes out there in the wasteland. Sandy knows very little of what transpired on those missions, but he would come back bruised and battered frequently enough that it gives her pause.

Not to mention the other thing.

Her throat clenches, nervousness and the threat of dehydration.

She wants to hide this too. It is a critical weakness, one that should remain unseen, but she knows it can’t. These former enemies are her companions now; they serve Tripitaka just as she does.

It is her duty to ensure they’re well prepared for the trials that lie ahead.

She grips the knife a little tighter, swallows until her throat stops clenching, and says, “No water out there.”

Tripitaka turns, frowning. “What?”

“No water,” Sandy says again. Is her voice shaking? She can’t tell. “None that I can sense, anyway. Nothing above the ground, nothing beneath it. Not a trace of water out there, anywhere at all.”

She keeps to herself how terrifying that is to a god with her particular gift. How debilitating to be without her lifeblood, the water that runs through her veins and keeps her body breathing.

Tripitaka is not thankful for the information. He doesn’t quite glare at her like he does at Monkey, but it’s clearly a struggle to restrain himself. He really doesn’t appreciate being presented with obstacles, Sandy notes.

“So we refill out waterskins before we leave,” he says, stopping just short of snapping. “And drink sparingly while we’re out there. Good enough?”

Sandy certainly hopes so.

Her true feelings, as usual, she hides. She has done her duty, sharing vital information; let that be enough for now.

“As you wish, Tripitaka,” she says, and goes back to her whittling.

Peace, then, and mostly quiet, if only for a short while. Just the rasping rhythm of metal on wood, even and smooth, as the nothing she’s carving takes shape. Just the distant drone of Monkey and Tripitaka as they go back to their arguing, as if they truly believe they can change with words the unpleasantness of tomorrow’s journey. Just the clattering of Pigsy’s plate as he finishes his meal and sets it aside. Just the grunt and groan of his body as he—

_No_.

She keeps her eyes on the wood, her mind on the task. Focuses, with everything she has, on the curve of the blade, the motion of each stroke, each slash, each—

Pigsy clears his throat.

Sandy does not flinch. She does not tense or tighten or twitch.

She will not respond. She will not let this be a problem.

She—

“What’s that you’re working on?”

But he is _there_.

On his feet now, and lumbering towards her without so much as a word of warning. Tearing through her precious personal space, ripping it all apart like it means nothing, like it’s unimportant. Like it’s not on purpose that she’s seated a dozen paces or more away from the rest of them.

Like he was invited.

He was not. He will never be invited. Not here, not in her private sanctum, not—

Sandy doesn’t growl.

She doesn’t hiss, snarl, doesn’t make any of the animal noises gathering in her throat, doesn’t give in to her instincts.

She is still. She is unaffected. She is whittling wood, and she feels nothing.

She will hide. She will hide, if it’s the last thing—

“Hey.”

She tenses. Against all her best efforts, she tenses. 

Tries to speak, but her tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth. She feels paralysed, she feels trapped, cornered, threatened, she feels—

He doesn’t notice.

“Looks good,” he says. “Whatever it is.”

His breath is on her neck, warm and unthreatening. He’s leaning over her — too close, her nerves are screaming, much too close — trying to get a look at the wood in her hands, the stupid little carving that means nothing, that never meant anything. Like it belongs to him, like she belongs to him too, like the world and everything in it is his, his, _his_ —

It’s not what it feels like. She knows this.

It’s just the way he is, the life he lived and the selfish creature it made him. He’s never needed to ask before taking what he wants, never needed to think about those beneath him before he stepped forward, before he claimed, before he took, before he—

A habit for him, nothing more, to take what he wants and blithely assume that the world will accept it.

Instinct, perhaps, not so very different from the way Sandy hides or the way Tripitaka bows in prayer before a meal or the way Monkey can’t seem to say anything without rolling his eyes and looking bored. A habit, harmless and unintentional, and she knows he doesn’t mean anything by it.

But—

But it’s _hers_. 

All of it.

The stupid knot of wood and the stupid rock she’s sitting on and the stupid precious space she’s holding, her personal space, her private space, her space, hers, hers, _hers_.

It’s not for him. He has no right to just come in and—

And then his hand is on her shoulder.

Gentle. No threat, no danger, no reason to react at all. He’s touching her like it’s easy, like it’s simple, like they’re friends and this is just how friends treat each other. He’s touching her like—

He is _touching_ her.

She blinks and he’s on his knees.

She blinks and she is on her feet.

She’s standing over him, one knee pressed to the base of his spine. She’s standing over him, wrenching his arm behind him until it threatens to come out of its socket. She’s standing over him, pressing the edge of her knife to his throat. She’s standing over him, and she has no idea how it happened.

She doesn’t remember standing. She doesn’t remember putting her knee to his back, her hand to his wrist, her knife to his throat.

But here she is, and here he is too: completely at her mercy.

“Touch me again without permission,” her voice says, of its own accord, “and I will gut you.”

She has no idea whether the threat will prove empty. She just knows that right now she means it with every breath in her body.

Pigsy, knowing better than to struggle, wails, “Okay, okay, I’m sorry! You’ve made your bloody point!”

Sandy is quite certain that she has not.

Tripitaka, little more than a disembodied voice somewhere in the back of her awareness, is yelling at her to stop.

For the first time in the few days since they met, the sound of her name on his tongue doesn’t affect her at all. Her heart, usually the first to stutter, is still thundering against her ribs; her mind, quick to soften at his command, remains clouded and foggy. She barely hears him, and she certainly does not heed him.

Monkey, meanwhile, is giggling like a delighted child.

“Leave her be, monk,” he says between guffaws, no doubt delighted to see Pigsy so reduced. “I mean, the big lug did ask for it.”

Pigsy moans feebly. “I said I was sorry...”

Sandy doesn’t move. She’s not sure she remembers how. Her fingers flex, tightening around his wrist, wrenching his arm a little further back until she’s certain it really will tear. She’s not doing any of this herself; it’s like her body has taken on a mind of its own, survival instincts kicking in to overpower every thought, every breath, everything.

She is not hiding now. Her thoughts, her feelings, her whole self, vividly and viscerally on display. She is utterly at the mercy of her body.

Just like he is.

It is not nearly as frightening as it should be.

It is, after all, the reason why she’s still alive.

“Sandy.” Tripitaka’s voice again, louder now and more forceful. Loud enough to cut through the nothing in her head, forceful enough to latch on to her other instincts, the ones that worship his name as the humans do gods. “Sandy, that’s enough.”

Sandy closes her eyes. “He touched me,” she rasps.

“And he apologised for it.” His voice is high and shaky; he sounds like he’s choking on all the fear she should be feeling herself. “Let him go now, Sandy. Please.”

The knife jumps in her hand. Blood beads against the blade.

The shock of pain startles Pigsy into action. Self-preservation or panic, it’s hard to say, but the end result is the same: he lets out a high-pitched, horrified squeal, and finally summons the strength to start struggling. 

It’s not a show of strength — hers is by far the superior position for that — but Sandy’s limbs go slack just the same, thrown by the sudden, unexpected pull of resistance. She could easily hold him down if she wanted to, but it seems that her body has a mind of its own in this as well: it shudders once, muscles quivering, then yields without warning.

She falls to her knees. 

He lurches to his feet.

“Bloody lunatic!”

And he stomps back to the fire, pressing a hand to his neck while his other arm dangles uselessly at his side.

Sandy watches him go, feeling ill.

Tripitaka, still keeping a safe distance behind her, says, “What in the world was that?”

She turns, recovered enough to be drawn once more to the sound of his voice. Her vision is blurry and distorted; she has to shake her head a few times before it clears enough to make out his face. Pinched and drawn, he’s staring at her with the wide, frightened eyes of a sheltered little human facing his first monster.

“He touched me,” she whispers again.

Tripitaka shakes his head. “We don’t assault our friends just because they touch us, Sandy.”

Sandy laughs at that, ragged and angry and broken, but she can’t find the words to say why.

Perhaps that’s for the best. She has already revealed too much of what she was supposed to keep hidden, too much of what she thinks and feels, too much of what she can’t forget, what Pigsy has forgotten already, what he was and what she was and what he did and what she did and what—

She swallows the laughter, lets it turn to poison in her stomach, and looks Tripitaka in the eye.

“I don’t know very much about friends,” she says. “Or what they do to each other. But _he_ —”

Her body starts to shake. The knife falls from her hand, taking the rest of the sentence with it.

Tripitaka frowns. “Sandy?”

She stands. It is more of a labour than it should be, and it takes all of her remaining strength not to let that show. Her legs feel like the water she loves so well: choppy and unsteady, like the ground is heaving underneath them. It’s a struggle to keep her feet under her, a force of impossible will to keep that discomfort hidden, to keep all of herself hidden.

As it needs to be. As she needs to—

“I should go,” she blurts out. She means ‘away from here, away from you, away from the quest’, but she knows that Tripitaka would never allow such a thing. So, instead, she says, “To fetch more water.”

Tripitaka is still frowning. “We can do that in the morning,” he says.

“We could do that, yes.” Sandy turns away, pretends to scour the horizon, searching for water they both know she could find with her eyes shut. “But why waste perfectly good daylight on a task that I can complete just as easily now?”

“Uh...” His expression flickers. Sandy draws some measure of triumph from the conflict on his face, the way he’s clearly trying to counter her logic, with little success. “Aren’t you tired?”

Sandy glances back at Pigsy. He’s not looking at her now, blessedly, but he’s clearly rattled by the incident. He’s shaking his arm, no doubt trying to recover some sensation, and the prick at his neck is still trickling blood.

It is an unsettling sight, or at least it seems to unsettle the others. Sandy suspects she’s supposed to feel remorse, or at least a little shame, but she doesn’t. She’s not sure what she does feel, but it is definitely not that.

“No,” she says to Tripitaka. “I’m not tired at all.”

He follows her gaze, lingering for just a beat too long on Pigsy’s bloodied neck, then surrenders with a sigh. The softening of his features gives away his thoughts: that it would perhaps be no bad thing to separate them for a while, that perhaps Sandy needs some space to cool her blood before she does some real damage, that perhaps Pigsy needs some as well, to lick his wounds and recover his pride.

That perhaps there was more to this incident than a moment of uninvited contact.

He is perceptive. It makes Sandy’s knees go weak, the brutality of being so effortlessly unveiled. 

“Just be careful,” he tells her at last. “We’ve had enough excitement for one evening.”

Sandy turns away. Pretends, again, to scour the horizon. Disappears into the shadows, and hides.

“I agree,” she murmurs, only when she’s certain that no-one else will hear.

*

In the few days since they set out on the quest, they’ve never been more than a hundred paces from fresh water.

Tomorrow, when they enter the barren lands, this will change.

The barren lands, barren in every way imaginable. Void of animals, plants, people, void of all life except the demon sentinels and the god-skinned monsters who would barter and bargain with them.

Void, particularly, of _water_. The uneasiness in Sandy’s belly, already seething after the incident with Pigsy, grows a thousand times worse when she thinks of being so far away from it for so long.

She will hide this discomfort too, of course. Keep to herself the misery of dehydration, the horror of having nothing but air to breathe, the pain of being separated from a part of her lifeblood. Keep it to herself, all of it, not because she’s ashamed of what she is but because she knows that they could never understand.

Because she thinks perhaps _he_ is the only one of them who would.

Pigsy, who has grappled and wrangled and fought against gods of all kinds. He knows far more about these things than Monkey, who has been asleep for centuries longer than Sandy has been alive, or Tripitaka, who is human and could never truly grasp the nuances of gods’ powers. Pigsy, who is so much like her in so many ways; Sandy knows he would understand this, if only she could—

No. Never.

He has no right to see her discomfort. He has no right to touch her misery or know her pain, no right to look at her and claim he understands anything at all.

Where was all that understanding when she needed it?

When she...

When _he_ —

She falls to her knees in front of the first stream she finds. Splashes her face until it cools, until her blood and her temper are cooler too, and shoves the memories to the fringes of her mind, the dark, shadowy corners where even she is too afraid to visit.

She stays there, just like that, for as long as she can. On her knees, dripping water, breathing bubbles.

They wouldn’t understand this either, she thinks. The cool, clean droplets cascading off her face, her hair, her everything, touching her for just a moment and then gone, dispersed like vapour under the midday sun. The comfort it brings, being connected to the parts of her that sing and swim. It makes her feel whole, touching the water; it reminds her that this, at least, is all her own. Wholly and completely, it is hers, and whatever else they might take from her they will never, ever, ever take that.

Well...

Not until they cross into the barren lands, that is, and it all evaporates.

But that’s a struggle for tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after.

Tonight—

“Sandy?”

Tonight, it seems, she is doomed to once again be dragged back into uninvited companionship.

She shuts her eyes, lets the water settle in her lungs, and hopes it will ease the tension in her voice.

“Tripitaka.”

His name echoes in her head, but she doesn’t look up to see his face. She doesn’t stand, doesn’t turn, doesn’t move at all. She stays precisely where she is, on her knees in front of the whispering water, a moment of reverence that reminds her potently and painfully of their first meeting.

Her knees hurt then, she remembers. The sewer floor was so hard, wet but not clean at all, and the impact jolted through her like a blow. Like the sound of his name, tangled up on her tongue, spoken aloud for the first time in all those years of waiting. _Tripitaka_ , whispered then just as it is now: on her knees, bathed in water.

The only difference: this time her knees don’t hurt.

Out here the ground is soft, the dirt yielding. Out here the water under her boots is as clean as the stream, and her knees find purchase easily, digging into the cool, life-giving earth.

She never imagined she might find something familiar here, out here under the natural light. She never imagined—

Ah, but water is water, be it filth dripping down the sewer walls or the cleansing coolness of dew on grass. Its heartbeat bursts inside her chest, and she knows that it doesn’t matter.

Where there is water, she will always find a place to hide.

When she does find the courage to open her eyes and turn, she finds him watching her from a couple of paces back. He remains standing, just as he did that night in the sewers when she fell to her knees in worship. No doubt he feels safer that way, being the taller one for once.

Human behaviour is vividly predictable, Sandy thinks, and Tripitaka’s is particularly so. He is worried and uneasy, and the way he’s working his jaw tells her that he’s trying to figure out how best to phrase himself, how to show kindness in the interrogation they both know is coming.

Sandy doesn’t want that. _Kindness_ , the very thought makes her blood run cold.

But Tripitaka is a kind soul, and he will do whatever he can to make this easier.

He doesn’t understand that it won’t, that there is nothing easy in accepting kindness, that trying to speak to her as if she is worthy will only make it more unpleasant, more painful, more—

“I suppose,” Sandy says quickly, “you want to talk about it?”

He blinks, not bothering to mask his surprise. Apparently he didn’t expect her to be so self-aware, or perhaps he really thought he was being subtle about this. As if she would believe for even a moment that he would abandon his less destructive friends and a nice warm fire just to try and help a water-attuned god fetch water.

“I think we should,” he admits, clearly choosing his words with great care. “If this is going to be a problem, I think...”

He stops, biting his lip.

Sandy turns back to the stream, grounds herself in the fresh-flowing water. She watches the ripples and the bubbles, the little eddies and the tiny rocks just below the surface, eroded until they’re smooth and shiny. Beautiful, she thinks, and wraps the word around her heart; even now, even after everything she’s seen and endured and done, she can see and recognise beauty.

It’s a small comfort, but a comfort still. Whatever else she has lost, she will not lose that.

“It’s not going to be a problem,” she says, as smooth as the pebbles, as still as the earth.

Tripitaka sighs, low and a little tense. Understandably, he’s not very happy with her.

“Sandy, you almost ripped his arm out of its socket.” She doesn’t look up, but she can feel his eyes on her just the same. Assessing, judging, biting down on his frustration. “You drew blood.”

“Just a little.”

“He’s a _god_.”

“So am I.” Her throat grows tight as she tries and fails to swallow, an unpleasant sharpness not unlike pain. “People so often forget that.”

She turns back to see if she’s made her point. Must have done, she supposes, because the look in Tripitaka’s eyes feels like pain as well.

“Sandy,” he says. The name is unpleasant now, soft and sickly-sweet; it sticks to her teeth like too much sugar, and makes her a little queasy. “Is this... being touched, I mean... is it something we need to...”

He trails off, turning his face away. Sandy doesn’t understand what he’s trying to say, or why he looks so sad.

“It’s something he needs to not do,” she says, hoping that’s an appropriate answer to a question only halfway asked. “Surely it shouldn’t be difficult to simply not touch someone without asking for permission first?”

“Of course.” He’s still biting his lip, though, and still averting his eyes. Sandy suspects it wasn’t an appropriate answer after all. “I’ll talk with him about that. But that’s not... I wasn’t talking about the impoliteness of it.”

Sandy’s chest feels tight. It’s suddenly very difficult to breathe, so she plunges her hands back into the stream.

Cool, clean, crystalline. The bubbles soothe her mind, the ripples calm her body, loosening the tension until it unravels. She holds herself like that, breathing in sync with the ripples and bubbles, until she trusts herself to speak again without causing more discomfort for them both.

“Then what?”

She thinks she knows. The world is so transparent, and so is everyone in it. She sees the shadows gathering behind Tripitaka’s features, sees the way he lets go of his lip only to start chewing the inside of his cheek instead, and she thinks she understands what those things mean:

_Is it going to be a problem,_ he wants to know. _This anger you feel for our new friend?_

But that’s not what he says.

Instead, with the quiet wisdom of a monk much older than his few years, he says, “I can’t begin to imagine the things you must have been through.”

That’s not what Sandy expected at all.

It’s also not untrue, and she will not insult either of them by pretending it is.

She draws her hands out of the water, touches her face with dripping fingertips. Lets the coolness permeate the skin, smudged with dirt and roughened by years of pain. It soothes, it balms, it cleanses, and it makes it easier for her to reply with the honesty they both value so highly.

“I’m sure you can’t,” she agrees. “You should be grateful for that.”

“I am,” Tripitaka says, rather hastily. “But that’s not what I...” He blows out a breath. He’s definitely frustrated now; she can taste its taint on the cool, damp air. “Sandy, if there are... if you have unpleasant associations with being touched, I’d like to try and help.”

Against her will, Sandy feels her spine stiffen. “Of course I have unpleasant associations with it,” she says, rather more harshly than she intends. “Touch has only ever ended in violence and brutality. Surely you can imagine that much, at least?”

“I can. Of course I can.” He looks so sad, so despondent, like her pain is his. It makes her want to cry, makes her want to hurt herself instead of the demons who made her this way, if only it would make him hurt less. “I’m asking if there’s... if your experiences have left you wounded. Traumatised. If these responses to being touched are... that is, if there’s something deeper that we need to work through. Do you understand?”

Sandy blinks.

“Oh.”

And then—

“ _Oh_.”

Tripitaka looks uncomfortable. But also, finally, a little more hopeful. “Yeah.”

Sandy doesn’t remember clenching her jaw, but it’s tight enough now to hurt.

“No,” she says.

It may be true. It may not. She’s never given it enough thought to know for sure. She’s never—

She’s never been free enough, comfortable enough, _safe_ enough. To look at the world in such a simple, detached way, to look back on her life and experiences as things that no longer exist, past-tense footnotes of horrors that once happened to some poor unfortunate god. To look back on those moments as then rather than now, as things that were rather than things that still are.

She’s not sure she wants to think about them like that. She’s not sure she’s ready yet. They defined her for so long; without them, what’s left?

Slowly, carefully, Tripitaka drops down into a crouch. He moves like someone with experience, lowering his body until he’s almost at eye-level with her. Sandy is vaguely reminded of the way humans draw themselves down to speak to small children, making themselves less intimidating by making themselves smaller.

Is that how he thinks of her, she wonders. As something small and easily intimidated?

If so, he could not be more wrong.

She lets it happen, though, watching him wordlessly as he looks up at her, finding her gaze and holding it.

“Sandy.” Too slow, too careful; it makes her nervous. “The way you reacted just now...”

“I told you.” Her jaw is still aching, the tension almost unbearable. It’s a challenge just to try and get the words out, and she’s not sure how well she succeeds. “It’s not going to be a problem.”

He sits with that for a beat, letting it settle, weighing up her honesty. Sandy watches him watching her, waits until she’s absolutely certain he won’t approach, then turns back to the water. Ignoring their empty skins, she fills her hands instead, bowing her head to drink, to fill her body with the only thing that has ever sustained it, to quiet her thoughts with the mindlessness of tending other parts.

She knows what he’s thinking.

_We need to talk_. 

Except he doesn’t really mean ‘we’ at all.

He knows — no, he _believes_ he knows — exactly what she’s been through, exactly how she feels about it, and exactly what he can do to help. He has decided these things, despite all her insistences to the contrary, despite all her efforts to hide, despite everything, and she knows that he will not be swayed by such meagre obstacles as the truth.

Sandy wonders how clear these things must look inside his head. She recalls him arguing with Monkey, poring over the Scholar’s old map, and she wonders if he’s painted one for her as well. Cragged and cracked, an environment just as inhospitable as the barren lands; has he marked out all the places he thinks there will be scars, plotted the journey from their points of origin? He must see her life as something so simple, like tracking a river to its source.

It is so very typical of a monk, she thinks, and recalls the Scholar with a pang.

A part of her feels relieved. It's what she wanted, after all: to be so well hidden that even he can’t break through to what is true.

But she doesn’t want to deceive him, no matter the personal discomfort. 

Tripitaka is the reason she’s still alive. She is here for him, because of him, about him; she joined the quest in his name, and she is sworn and bound to him with every breath in her body. Even without looking back, she knows that her feelings are tangled up with his.

She doesn’t want him to feel pain because of her. She doesn’t want him to worry, doesn’t want him to feel that he needs to offer aid or guidance for these illusory experiences he’s mapped out for her. She doesn’t want him to feel it’s his place to help her through something he only imagines he can understand.

That’s not why she’s here. It’s not why she—

It makes her angry to think of it. Angry with herself, of course, but far more angry with Pigsy. For approaching her in the first place, for talking to her, for touching her. For all the things he did just now and all the things he did long before she’d ever heard Tripitaka’s name.

For making her like this. For making her—

In the stream, the water becomes restless.

Violent, like the inside of her head. Bubbles bursting on the surface, ripples forming from nowhere, currents turning to rapids, little waves lashing at the ground beneath her knees, rising and rising and—

“Sandy.”

She closes her eyes. Focuses her thoughts, wills her mind to grow calm and steady and still. Drives back the anger, commands the water to heed her and grow calm as well. Waits, breath held in, for the bubbles to stop bursting, for the currents to slow, for the maelstrom inside her head to die down so that the maelstrom outside of it can slowly do the same.

A strange, difficult thing, to hold her insides down. She’s never had to do that before, never needed to consider the wider effects of her feelings. Never had anyone else around in moments like this. The water understands her; it feels what she feels. Tripitaka does not. He can only watch from a distance and let his monk’s imagination convince him he understands.

Sandy opens her eyes. Gazes into the water, watches as the bubbles dissipate, as the waves begin to recede. 

_Better_ , she thinks, and exhales.

“I’ll restrain myself,” she says to Tripitaka. “I’ll hold my responses down. I’ll temper my instincts, swallow my reflexes, no matter that they kept me alive. I won’t raise my hand against him again, no matter that he deserves it. I—”

She stops, hearing the catch in his breath.

“I’m not sure he does deserve it,” he says, sounding faintly horrified. “I know your instincts are... that is, I know it’s been difficult for you to adjust. I understand that, and I promise I’ll speak to him about respecting your boundaries—”

“Good,” Sandy croaks, before she can stop herself.

"But it was an accident,” he presses, ignoring her. “A misunderstanding, that’s all. And I don’t believe anyone deserves to bleed for that. Never mind that you almost ripped out his arm.”

The water seethes, threatening to surge again. Sandy swallows a few times, breathing slowly through her nose, and tries not to scream.

“He deserves it,” she repeats, tasting violence and the metallic hint of blood. “And worse.”

“Sandy...” His breath hitches again, but this time it brings something entirely new: comprehension. “ _Oh_.”

Sandy bites down on her tongue, hard, until she feels able to hide again.

“He’s a part of this quest,” she says, watching the bubbles shatter as they rise to the surface, giving away the things she won’t let into her voice. “Just as I am.”

Tripitaka ignores that. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks instead.

It is the most absurd question, truly. For a moment or two, Sandy can only stare at him, not bothering to mask her derision.

“Tell you what?” she demands, somewhat peevishly. “You know what he was. You know who he worked for. You know what he did in her name. All these things you already knew when you convinced him to change his ways and join the quest. What could you possibly need to know that you haven’t already learned from experience?”

A ridiculous question. She knows the answer just as surely as he does. Still, a small, masochistic part of her wants to hear him say it. Wants the words to burst and break like the bubbles in the stream, wants to feel them heating her blood, wants to remember all the reasons why she’s so angry, why her body is shaking, why she can’t—

“I know what he did under Locke,” Tripitaka agrees slowly. “But I think...” He takes a deep, shaky breath. “I think maybe I don’t know what he did to _you_.”

His throat constricts with an audible click. Sandy feels her ribs doing the same, squeezing her lungs and her heart until she’s sure it will be the death of her.

“I’m sure you can guess,” she manages.

“I’m not so sure I can.” Another click, then another. He looks so sad, so stricken; it hurts so much. “The way you reacted... the damage you...” He turns pale, and Sandy has to fight to keep from blanching too; she steadies herself, holds her heart down, watches the beautiful colours bleed out from his face. “It’s not because he touched you. It’s because _he_ touched you.”

There it is, and it burns exactly as hot as Sandy expected it to, a flash-fire in her veins like the lightning Pigsy calls down at will; it tears through her, takes everything she is and scorches it dry, burns her and bleeds her until there is nothing left at all. 

She wants to dive into the stream, to throw herself into it and hold her breath until she drowns. Never mind that it’s too shallow to hold her, never mind that it’s too clear to keep her hidden, never mind that it’s just as small and useless as she is, good for nothing but filling their bellies. Never mind any of that. She wants to dive, she wants to drown, she wants to—

Perhaps there is something deeper in her, after all. Something she needs to work through, something that Tripitaka would call ‘wounded’.

If there is, she will work through it without any help from him.

She is here to help him. The Scholar said that she was to be his protector, his guide. His friend, if he’ll accept such a thing as friendship from such a thing as her. That’s why she’s here, that is all she can allow herself to do, her purpose, her reason, her everything: _help him_.

She can’t do that if he’s too busy trying to help her.

“Any ill feelings I harbour,” she says, choosing her words very carefully, “are mine to worry about.”

“Not if it interferes with the quest.” It’s almost automatic, the way he blurts it out, like he knows that’s the only thing she’ll listen to. “If it affects your ability to work together as a team, we need to—”

“It doesn’t,” Sandy interrupts, feeling her blood start to burn. “And it won’t.”

Tripitaka shoots her a look that makes it quite clear he doesn’t believe her.

“We need to be able to trust each other,” he says. His voice is a strange thing, straddling the line between compassion and authority; firm, yes, and commanding, but he’s trying very hard to temper it with kindness. The latter twists in her stomach; the former makes her chest ache, and she doesn’t know how to respond to either. “Maybe with our lives. Do you think you can do that with him?”

Sandy bristles. “Of course.”

A lie, of course, and he knows it just as well as she does.

She hates that; she’s angry and upset, shaking with it, and there is too much bubbling inside of her to try and hide like she wants—

Like she needs to.

She hates that she can’t, hates that she has lost the one thing she still had, hates the reflection of her face in Tripitaka’s eyes, vulnerable and visible and weak. She is as pale as death in those dark, warm depths, and it gives away everything: all her pain, all her anger, all the horrible, monstrous parts of herself that she’s tries so hard to keep hidden.

Tripitaka shuffles forward a little. “Sandy...”

“It won’t be a problem, Tripitaka.” She’s almost crying now. “I swear it.”

“You keep saying that,” he says. “I’m not sure I’m the one you’re trying to convince.”

He’s still moving, creeping his way forward as he speaks. Another inch, and then another, closer and closer with each syllable. By the time he’s finished talking, he’s deep in her personal space, close enough to risk meeting the same fate as Pigsy if he so much as breathes on her.

He won’t, of course. Because he’s not Pigsy. Because he—

Because he is Tripitaka.

Whatever terrible associations Sandy might have with touch, whatever horrible things she feels about personal space or violation or people in general, she will never raise a hand against Tripitaka.

Never again.

She focuses on her breathing: in and out, in and out, in rhythm with the little monk’s approach. She tells herself that this isn’t a problem either, the hammering of her heart against her ribs, the way her stomach clenches and her ribs squeeze her heart and her nerves seize up. She tells herself this is a normal reaction to the human whose name sustained her for so long. She tells herself it’s him and not her, it’s not the same, it’s not—

Lies, all of it. But she has to believe it, or there’ll be nothing left of her.

She presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth, holds it there until it’s numb. Then, keeping her mind as blank as she can, she says, “He deserves a chance to redeem himself. Whatever else he deserves, he deserves that.”

Tripitaka nods minutely. “He does.”

“I won’t stand in the way,” Sandy promises. “I won’t do anything to jeopardise his efforts or make them more difficult. So long as his intentions are good, I swear I won’t—”

“So long as he doesn’t touch you?”

His voice rises on ‘touch’, twisting the word into a challenge. Like he’s trying to figure out how deep this really goes, how much of it is really about Pigsy and how much is just her. Sandy wishes she had an answer for him, wishes she could rise to the challenge and defeat it, but she can’t. She doesn’t know herself any better than he does.

“I will be better,” she says, because that’s all she can give. “As I said. I will restrain myself, no matter my—”

She does not say ‘feelings’.

She bends over the stream, hiding her face and her heart, her white jaw and her wild eyes, hiding from his warmth, his compassion, his kindness, hiding most of all from his terrible, terrifying desire to—

“Let me help.”

—to do _that_.

His closeness, even without contact, is incendiary. Sandy tells herself, again, that it’s not the same — he’s not Pigsy, he’s not a demon, he’s not a monster, he’s _Tripitaka_ — but her body refuses to listen. She’s shaking, shivering, she’s hot and cold all over, and she can feel the stream threatening to surge once more, its seething water a weapon waiting for her hand to wield it.

She closes her eyes. She holds her breath, holds her thoughts, holds herself down.

“I don’t need help,” she manages.

Tripitaka is staring at her when she trusts her eyes to open again. He looks so sad, so soft, like he’s hurting too, just from being close to her. Like he can see things inside her that she even she can’t reach, dreadful and horrible things, things that no monk should ever have to see, that no god should ever have to endure, that no—

“Not with that,” he says, with a firmness that belies his sad, soft eyes.

Sandy frowns. “I don’t...”

He smiles. She recognises that smile; the Scholar wore it sometimes. It’s not a good one; he only ever wore it when she’d disappointed him, when she’d failed to grasp something he believed was simple, when she could not learn a lesson he thought was important.

Tripitaka moves in a little more, so close she can feel his breath on her skin, and says, “I meant with the water.”

Then he leans all the way over the stream, brushing her sleeve with his fingers — it must be deliberate, the glancing contact, the way it lingers when it doesn’t have to, because he’s studying her face the whole time, watching her eyes and her mouth, searching for a response — and picks up one of the forgotten waterskins.

“Oh,” Sandy says. Then, with no less confusion, “I don’t understand.”

Tripitaka looks down at her sleeve, the tattered fabric only slightly disturbed by the contact. He studies it for a long, long moment, as though trying to figure out whether any other part of her is disturbed as well — he will find nothing, Sandy decides; she is at least still capable of hiding that — then looks up to meet her eyes.

“You said it’s not a problem,” he says, very carefully. “I believe you.”

It’s a blatant lie. Sandy doesn’t need her preternatural talent for sensing deception to see that: Tripitaka is terrible at keeping his expression neutral, and the quivering of his lip gives him away.

She suspects he’s doing it for her benefit, to try and make her feel better, but it has rather the opposite effect. Deception never tastes like comfort, no more than contact or kindness or any other strange human emotion; to Sandy, they all end the same way, and never with safety.

Still, though, he is trying. For her sake, he is trying. That means something.

So she bites down on her tongue and her instincts, hides the discomfort like she has a thousand times before, and nods.

“Thank you,” she says, turning to the remaining waterskins, eyes downcast so that he won’t notice that she’s lying too.

Tripitaka smiles, then sets to work filling up his skin. Sandy takes a moment to swallow down the bitter taste of deception on both sides, then wordlessly follows suit, picking up a second skin and submerging herself in the quiet simplicity of a mundane, easy task.

For a little while, it is perfect. Just the two of them and the clear stream, their hands and clothes soaked, the skins growing heavy one by one, filled with precious live-preserving water. Sandy could gladly lose herself in a moment like this, survival of the softest, sweetest kind, and never again think about anything else.

Alas, Tripitaka will not allow such a thing.

Efficient as any good monk, he waits only as long as it takes to complete the task, and then it’s all over. The instant it’s done, he lifts his head, catches her eye, and Sandy is as helpless as she was before.

There is so much sorrow in his eyes, and so much hope trying to temper it, that she finds she can’t look away. She knows what he’s going to say before the words ever leave his mouth, just as she knows that she’ll have no choice but to obey, and it terrifies her that her reflexes are silent, that she doesn’t even try to escape her fate.

“Promise me,” Tripitaka says, predictable and painful and paralysing. “If it does become a problem, you’ll talk to me before you do anything reckless.”

Like leaving the quest, he means. Like he can somehow tell that she’s been thinking of doing precisely that.

Perhaps he can, at that. Sandy has been working so hard to hide her feelings and her struggles, perhaps she’s left other things too much on display.

She squirms, discomfited by the thought. The waterskin in her hands feels suddenly, overwhelmingly heavy. “I...”

“Promise me,” Tripitaka says again, and his voice quakes with unintended power. “I’ll make it an order if I have to, Sandy. Don’t think I won’t.”

He doesn’t want to. That speaks of something righteous in him, she supposes.

Still, it’s a low blow, twisting her devotion into something like this: obedience, even against her most powerful survival instincts. Sandy can’t deny him anything, and she never would, but being coerced like this makes her nerves feel razed and raw. She wonders idly if this is how Monkey feels in the grip of the crown sutra: helpless, and completely at the monk’s mercy.

“You don’t know what you ask,” she tells him, in a hoarse, shaking whisper. “Talking to people... talking to _you_... I...”

Tripitaka sets down the waterskin, and turns to gaze up at her. One hand outstretched, palm facing up, silently asking permission to touch.

Sandy wants so badly to shake her head, to retreat, perhaps even to disappear completely, but she can’t. She can no more deny him this than she could deny him anything else, and so she nods her assent and tries not to tremble too violently when he reaches for her hand, fingertips splayed across her knuckles, the lightest, most delicate pressure she’s ever felt.

He is so kind, she thinks. And she is so—

“I know,” he whispers, achingly tender. “It’s been a long time since you had anyone who...”

Sandy shakes her head; under his hand, hers shakes as well. “Since I had anyone,” she finishes.

It is nearly enough to break her. The confession, the truth of it ringing like a bell in her head, the fragile weight of his touches, contact intended with kindness and compassion: without threat, without pain, without blood. It is so much, it is too much, and she can’t, she can’t, she—

She yanks her hand back, feeling flayed and torn open.

Perhaps there is something about touch, after all. The contact, the compassion, the kindness. The impossibility of all those things in a world whittled out of broken bones.

Perhaps—

“Sandy.” Tripitaka pulls away, sitting back on his haunches to give her some desperately-needed space. “No-one is expecting you to adjust overnight. To any of this, but especially to having to work alongside someone who...” He pauses a beat, studying her closely, gauging her responses, feeling out and divining the truth that she has not given a name. “...someone who hurt you.”

Sandy shakes her head. “It’s not—”

Stops, strangling the words before they can take shape, before she can insist on something that may or may not be true.

She doesn’t know what she should say, doesn’t know what she wants to say either, and every available path is murky and dangerous. Tripitaka is right, but he doesn’t understand at all, and the tension in Sandy’s body is pulling itself to pieces trying to figure out which part of his face she should focus on.

It hurts, brutally and viscerally. But he is not wrong, and she cannot lie and tell him he is.

“I promise,” she concedes after a long moment, “if it becomes a problem I will talk to you.”

Tripitaka smiles. Still guarded, but starting to relax. Sandy wishes she could do the same.

“That’s all I ask,” he says.

Sandy opens her mouth, then closes it again with a sigh. “Yes,” she says, and feels stupid.

Tripitaka’s smile doesn’t waver. He doesn’t stay long enough to let it.

He rises smoothly, hauling up the waterskins and turning away. His movements are slow and careful, and he takes great care to broadcast each step before he makes it, like she’s a wounded animal and he’s trying not to upset or antagonise her. Like he thinks she might—

Like he doesn’t know what she might do.

“Take some time to yourself,” he says, before he leaves. “As much as you need. I’ll see you back at camp.”

Sandy doesn’t watch him go. She’s too busy trying to figure out whether it was compassion she heard in his voice, or fear.

*


	2. Chapter 2

*

The truth is, Pigsy has only ever touched her once before, and it was entirely without violence.

Maybe that’s why she still feels its resonance so strongly.

It was no lie, what she said to Tripitaka: that physical contact has only ever ended in brutality and pain. It was no lie that she can’t fathom what it means to be touched without those things, that she can’t imagine a moment of contact that means only comfort, that means compassion and tenderness and protection, friendship and warmth and kindness.

These things are completely beyond her understanding. She does not know them; she may never know them.

What she does know, what she has known for as long as she can remember, is violence. Violence not just in touch but in everything. Violence in their eyes and their voices, violence in the way they stand and walk and sneer. Violence in the air, boiling with the threat of blood; violence in the earth, churned up with blame and pain, hatred and revulsion and horror. Violence in the water when she called it to her aid, cornered and dizzy and helpless. Violence, the only constant thread through demons and humans and gods.

Pigsy never needed to touch her to hurt her.

He never needed to do the work himself.

In that, at least Locke taught him very well.

Sandy learned from both of them, and by living in the world they’d built together. She learned to stay out of sight, to never be caught or cornered, to never go out in daylight, to never go anywhere where there might be people. She learned to avoid light, avoid life, avoid everyone and everything that might be able to touch her.

She learned, most importantly, to hide.

To hide like her life depended on it, to—

To hide _because_ her life depended on it.

He made sure of that as well, didn’t he?

Some days she remembers it so vividly it feels like she’s experiencing it all over again. Others it’s like the blurred haze of a fever dream, discordant and delirious and uncertain; even her mind is a monster she can’t trust, and she’s never entirely sure which of her memories are real and which are all in her head.

She remembers his touch, though. Whatever else may warp and fade with time and trauma, whatever else may get lost or broken in the mess of her memory, his touch never, ever will.

It was so strange. That’s why she remembers it so clearly. Because it was strange, because it was wrong, because no-one had touched her like that in more years than she could count.

Because there was no violence in it at all.

*

All things considered, she probably remembers it better than she should.

They had her in a back alley, drugged and bound. Dizzy, delirious, disoriented, her lungs full of demon-made smoke her head full of vertigo, subdued and entirely helpless while he looked her over. She remembers the feeling so well, the smoke-thick confusion, the loss of control over her body: they would do it to her many times over the years, enough that it’s almost become a kind of nostalgia to remember it.

She couldn’t move. This she remembers too. Coming around with her head on the ground, unable to fight, unable to struggle, unable to do much of anything at all. Possibly they’d overdone it, used too much; possibly she simply wasn’t as used to the stuff then as she would later become. Either way, the result was the same: paralysis and confusion, a god made weaker than a human.

Her instincts screamed at her to fight. To struggle, to grow wild, bare her teeth and lash out with fists and feet, to unleash the living hell of her powers. To do whatever it took to not be trapped, cornered, _helpless_ —

But she couldn’t even stand up. The world pitched and yawed beneath her when she tried to move, and she pitched with it, toppling forwards, backwards, sideways. She didn’t know which way was up, didn’t know anything, only that her body had failed her.

Starved, scrawny thing that it was, she supposed it was only a matter of time.

He stood over her, Pigsy, massive and immovable, a vision of intimidation. His whole body seemed built for it, to shrink gods and demons alike, to make anyone who crossed his path stumble in their rush to get out of his way.

Behind him, two of Locke’s guards. Sandy’s head throbbed with the effort of trying to make out their faces; she could only discern that they were human, and that they were not afraid of her.

Understandable, she supposed. If she were able to stand, she would have been unstoppable. But even humans knew a hobbled monster when they saw one: bound and drugged, weakened and wretched and unable to move, she was less even than them, and they had nothing to fear from her.

And in any case, they weren’t alone. With Pigsy standing in front of them, who wouldn’t be unafraid?

He was massive. Impossibly clean, gleaming from head to toe in his jewels and finery, he looked completely out of place in the dirt and grime of the alley. Strutting and swaggering, swinging his rake like it weighed nothing at all, he seemed to take up every inch of space; the world seemed to shrink around him, like the air itself was hurrying out of the way.

Sandy tried to shrink as well, making herself small and unintimidating as he approached, but her body was unable to do that either.

Couldn’t fight, couldn’t hide, couldn’t even make herself small. What was left but to accept the fact that she would probably die here, at the hands of this living, walking mountain? It took all the strength she had to face that, and to face him as well, glowering up at him through bleary, blinking eyes and hoping that she looked a little braver than she felt.

Going by the look on his face, pitying and slightly queasy as he crouched in front of her, she did not.

“All right,” he said, in a voice that somehow seemed much smaller than the rest of him. “Let’s take a look at you...”

Sandy tried to speak, but her tongue was too heavy; she couldn’t lift it, couldn’t shift it, couldn’t shape a syllable, much less a word.

What little sound she did make...

One of the guards laughed. “Scrawny thing. You sure it’s a god?”

The word reverberated oddly, like a staccato stammer in her head.

It had been so long since anyone had called her by that name, and her mind was so fuzzy and strange, she almost didn’t understand what it meant. She was too accustomed to hearing the other names — _demon_ and _monster_ and _thing_ — she’d entirely forgotten what it was to be recognised, to be seen and known and understood for what she really was, to hear that word — _god, god, god_ — and realise they were talking about her.

It didn’t last. What a fool she was, to imagine that it would.

Pigsy’s touch, like his voice, was unexpectedly soft. He hunkered down in front of her, one hand under her back, the other cupping her chin, tilting her face up to catch the meagre light.

She tried again to struggle. Light was danger, this she knew, but once again her body wouldn’t let her hide. It yielded to him, pliant and traitorous, like he owned it.

For all she knew, that was what he wanted. Him, or perhaps his mistress. The rumours of Locke’s appetites for gods were well known in Palawa and beyond, as were the rumours of her henchman’s appetites for everything else. Between the two of them...

Sandy growled again, no less pitiful. She didn’t expect it to be, but she had to try, had to resist in whatever futile, meagre way her useless body would allow. A growl like a whimper, but at least it was something.

Pigsy snorted. Amused, definitely, but at least he wasn’t laughing at her like his human entourage. While they sniggered and spouted their vitriol, he sighed, shook his head, and leaned in to touch her face again.

A strange thing, the way he touched her. No appetite, no anger, nothing she would have expected from the monster-god who’d sold his soul to warm a demon’s bed. His power was undeniable, an electric surge beneath the skin, but his touch was gentler than anything she’d ever known.

It terrified her.

Perhaps he sensed that, the little spasms beneath the surface, where even the drugs couldn’t reach. Perhaps he understood her position, at least a little, because his touch grew somehow softer still. The pads of his fingers under her chin, barely felt through the haze, guiding her bleary eyes up to meet his, peering into their depths like he was scrying for a soul.

_Good luck finding one of those in me,_ Sandy thought, and hiccuped with the strain of failing to laugh.

“Lucky,” Pigsy murmured, no doubt more to himself than the drugged, dizzy wreck at his feet. “Don’t get many like you these days. Rare enough if we survive past puberty, the world being what it is. Let alone...”

He stopped, glancing back at his humans, and when he turned to face her again his face was a rictus of grief.

Not just his face. The points of contact shifted as well, transformed into something new. A moment ago he’d been holding her upright, bracing with the hand at her back to keep her from flopping over; now he seemed to be simply holding her, keeping her close like a protector or a guardian, like a—

Ridiculous, of course.

The idealistic hallucination of a drugged, disoriented god. Nothing more, nothing less.

His other hand, still at her face, shifted a little as well. Brushing away the smears and smudges, trying to clean off the sewer-stains, the filth and misery that never fully disappeared. Life in the dark, life in the dirt, it was as much a part of her as the pale skin, the pale hair, the pale eyes; he could try for hours, even days, and he would be no closer to making her clean than she was herself after a lifetime of it. She’d gotten used to the stuff; he would too.

Besides, who cared what she looked like in the moment before he picked her up and dragged away to her death?

If she was lucky.

Death, she’d heard, was the kindest reprieve a god could hope for in a world run by monsters with hearty appetites.

But he didn’t pick her up, and he didn’t haul her away. He didn’t kill her and he didn’t take her and he didn’t use her to whet his famous appetites. He just looked at her with that strange soft sadness in his eyes, and the hand at her back eased her upright and held her steady, and the one at her face rested gently against her cheek, his massive palm blurring the dirt and sweat and blood of years in hiding. And for a moment, just a moment, that was all he did: held her, and covered up the stains of her life.

Stupidly, naively, Sandy thought she could feel compassion in those touches, thought she could almost feel—

_Kindness_.

For just a moment, she let herself imagine that such a thing existed, that she was worthy of it, that he might—

He touched her so gently.

This is what she remembers, this is what haunts her.

How gently he touched her. How sad he looked when he gazed down at her face, grief and regret and quiet recognition; how she looked up at him and imagined she heard him thinking, _you are like me_. How he tried, futile though the effort was, to scrub clean some of the filth she’d been living in, to make her look more like the god she was.

How she let herself believe, for one stupid, drugged moment, that there might be kindness in the world after all. How she convinced herself, seeing those things in his eyes, that there might be compassion, even for someone like her, even from someone like him, that he might be something more than the cold and heartless monster she’d assumed, that she—

That she might not be a monster either.

Stupid. Naive. When would she learn?

He held her gaze for a moment longer, as though drinking deep of whatever he saw there, then took a deep breath and turned back to his guards.

“You were right,” he told them, in a strange, heavy-sounding voice. “No god here. Just some half-starved little sewer demon.” His hand, still on her cheek, lost some of its gentleness. “Worthless.”

The word went straight through her, like a blow but somehow worse, and Sandy felt her whole body go limp.

Not the drug, not this time. Not fear or pain, either, though she was feeling both of those things in abundance.

Resignation, of a kind she hadn’t felt in many, many years. Disappointment, desolation, the devastation that comes from imagining, if only for a moment, that an encounter might have taken a different turn. Imagining that she might seen and understood, that she might be recognised for what she was by one who was not so different himself. Imagining that she might be known, imagining that he might show compassion, that he might show kindness, that he might—

And then, again, this.

_Demon_. Again.

_Worthless_. Again.

And with those words, it all disappeared. All the kindness, all the compassion, all the softness in his eyes and the gentleness of his touches. Everything, gone, vanished like it really was just her imagination, a trick of the light or the drugs still addling her mind.

Gone, just like that, and his expression twisted into something dark and cold. 

Shame and self-loathing, she recognised, the disgust of someone who had made a terrible mistake. The blame was his, he seemed to think, to let himself imagine that a wretch like her might not be a monster. He was the stupid one, to allow himself a moment of compassion for something so _worthless_.

The shorter of the guards made an impatient noise. “Bloody knew it,” he grumbled. “Nothing that pitiful could be a god.”

“Waste of our damn time,” the other one agreed. “Put the little monster out of its misery, and let’s get out of here.”

Pigsy’s hesitation was a brief, flickering thing. So brief that Sandy wondered — still wonders, some days — if she’d imagined that too.

He took back his hands, flexing his fingers and holding them up to the light. Unsupported, Sandy slumped forward; her face hit the cold stone floor, and she wondered if this was it, if he was finished toying with her. 

It really would be an end to the misery, she thought, and hoped against hope that it would be swift.

Would he strangle her with his bare hands, she wondered, or would he use the rake, showing off its power to his jeering human friends? She wondered which would be less painful, which would be kinder, gentler, more compassionate. She thought, delirious and self-hating, that perhaps she might prefer the other option, that it would be better to eviscerate the memory of false kindness, to die knowing his touch as it always should have been: ruthless and violent and cruel.

But he wouldn’t allow her even that meagre mercy.

“You know,” he said, with a slow, strange shrewdness, “I think I have a better idea.”

The guards looked at each other, unconvinced.

“You’re the boss,” one of them said with a shrug. “But if this involves me missing my lunch...”

“It doesn’t.”

He touched her again, then, hauling her up to her feet. A different touch, still shying away from brutality but rough now in a way it wasn’t before. He set her down, waiting with an unreadable expression as she fought to get her legs under her, and looked her up and down like a butcher inspecting a questionable side of raw meat.

Sandy swayed a little, but stayed mostly upright. The smoke was dissipating now, and her body was gradually returning to her. She had no delusions of appearing graceful, or even particularly sober, but she found that she did not care; better to weave and lurch than give him any more reason to touch her.

She would throw herself on his weapon before she would let herself be sucked in by his hands or his eyes again, before she let herself be drawn to the idea of kindness in a world where it did not exist. She would gladly die a wretched, worthless sewer monster if it meant not leaving herself open to another disappointment, another rejection, another—

Her thoughts vanished, evaporated like the smoke in her lungs, as he prodded her with his rake.

“Not much to look at,” he said, watching with a critical eye as she stumbled, struggling to hold her wobbly balance. “But she’ll do in a pinch, I reckon.”

“For what?” one of the guards demanded.

Pigsy grinned. A horrible, unsettling sight, it made Sandy choke and heave, filling her lungs with some intangible substance, more thick and cloying than even the smoke.

“What else?” he said, eyes glittering. “A scapegoat.”

The guards, seemingly no more enlightened, blinked.

Sandy—

Sandy wished she was as unenlightened as they were.

A part of her, desperate to be numb, wanted to ask for more of the disarming drug, willing to accept even its dreadful side-effects — weakness, unconsciousness, loss of control — if only it would stop the dull throbbing in her head, the sick, shuddering, horror.

“You...” Even now, mostly herself again, it was still difficult to speak. She had to cough several times just to get the words out at all, and even then they were slurred almost beyond coherence. “Do you really think your people are so easily manipulated?”

Pigsy wasn’t looking at her. Ashamed, perhaps, and with good reason.

“I don’t think it,” he said, sounding almost sad. “I know it.”

An unpleasant truth, but truth just the same. From her own experience, Sandy knew it as well.

For all her so-called ‘hospitality’, the people of Palawa hated Princess Locke. They resented being subjugated to a demon, resented her power and status, resented the way she lorded over them as if the town was hers by divine right, as if she hadn’t simply swooped in one day and decided to take it. They hated her definition of ‘order’, hated her astronomical taxes, hated her greed and selfishness. Most of all, they hated the way she swaggered and sauntered through the streets and called herself the town’s protector.

They hated Pigsy just as much, for many of the same reasons. Like his mistress, he did nothing but take what was theirs and claim the loss was for their own good. No matter that he did it all on Locke’s orders, no matter that he claimed to hate the task as much as they did, no matter that he did it — so he swore — for his own survival. No matter any of that: he was the one who who took their money, their livelihoods, and their homes, who demanded they pay with everything but their lives for things they did not need.

He, too, was the one who enforced those astronomical taxes that he and his mistress thrived on. Protection, he called it, from demons and monsters and other such threats, and never mind that those things did not exist. Never mind that the people needed the gold more than their so-called safety, never mind that they had none to spare; it was for the good of the town, he insisted, and everyone had to pay their share.

So they did, hating him and cursing his name.

_Worse than any silly monster, him and his lot._

Even in her present sad state, drugged and weak and giving serious thought to impaling herself on his rake, Sandy wasn’t stupid. She knew what he meant when he said ‘scapegoat’.

“This town wants a demon to hate,” he informed his guards, with another grin. “So let’s give them one.”

Sandy didn’t bother to point out that they hated her already, the people of the town. Didn’t bother to mention that they spat and snarled at her, the scary, shadow-dwelling creature, that they cursed her name nearly as often as they cursed Locke’s or Pigsy’s or their martial guard’s. A thief, starved into stealing to survive, bearing the face of a demon and the powers of a god. That was all the reason anyone had ever needed to hate her. Why would the people here be any different?

No sense making it easy for him; if he knew how despised she was already, it would only play into his hands.

So she bit her tongue, met his eyes, and willed her leaden limbs to move.

“Hating me won’t make them love you any better,” she spat. “Or her.”

An expert, even back then, at ignoring things he didn’t want to hear, Pigsy paid her no heed. He was staring at the ground, the middle distance between himself and his guards, still loitering back at the alley’s entryway. Swallowing his pride, perhaps, or else swallowing his shame.

His guards, meanwhile, were looking not at him but at her. They were staring openly now, looking her up and down, gauging her strength, her sturdiness, her ability to resist. She swayed and their eyebrows reacted; she growled and their eyes shifted. Trying to figure out how safe it was, she supposed, to make a public spectacle out of a demon’s execution.

“Looks the part, at least,” one of them murmured. “Not sure I feel like taking on one of their kind, though.”

Sandy growled again. “You shouldn’t.”

Pigsy continued to ignore her. Trying to set their minds at ease, no doubt, by pretending she was no threat. “She’s doped out of her head,” he reminded them, a rather unfortunate truth. “She’ll be soft as a kitten for another hour or so, at least.”

“Harmless, then?” the other one asked, taking a tentative step forward.

“Harmless enough for low-lives like you,” he responded. Then, with a pointed, lingering look at Sandy’s hands, he added, “Not _too_ harmless, though.”

“You what?”

Pigsy sighed. “Going to have to make a show of it, aren’t we?” he said, with waning patience. “Big up the threat, you know? Demons living in the sewers, stealing your food, your children, that sort of thing. That’s the whole bloody point: make the good people of this town see just how lucky they are to have us around. Protectors, guardians, blah blah blah, putting down all the big mean monsters and keeping them safe.”

If she’d had the strength, Sandy might have rolled her eyes. Might have tried to convince them of the truth: that she was not a demon, that she stole only as much as she needed to survive, that she despised children and certainly would never steal one. A simple truth, or so she thought, but she could see in their eyes that it would be pointless. The seeds of hate were already sown; Pigsy had made sure of that.

Why waste her breath on what experience has taught her was inevitable? No-one had ever believed her truth before; why would she expect that to change?

Instead, baring her teeth at his humans, she snarled, “I’ll bleed you dry.”

Pigsy beamed. “See? That’s the kind of authenticity I’m talking about!”

And he reached out to touch her one last time, locking his warm, powerful fingers around her wrist and hauling her out into the sunlight.

*

She got away, of course.

No question of that, no matter how harmless they thought she was. Survival instincts honed sharp, bevelled to a lethal point, cutting down anyone that stood in her path. What little remained of the drugs in her system were no match for her instincts and her powers once he threw her out onto the street, and she fought like the demon monster they kept insisting she was.

She fought. She fought and she fought and she fought, with only the most nascent awareness of the gathering crowds, the rumble of hatred brewing like a storm in the air, like lightning threatening to strike, eager to ignite whatever it touched. She knew it was there, but it was a distant thing, a threat she would only realise later, when she was home, safe back in the shadows.

Not now, though. Not here. 

Here, with the sun blaring into her eyes, their voices ringing in her ears. Here, with their bodies converging on hers, their weapons all drawn, sharp and shiny and hungry for blood.

Here, she could entertain only one thought: _survive_.

And she did.

It wasn’t the first time she’d been cornered by human-shaped monsters with sharp sticks and sharper intentions. Wasn’t the first time they saw her skin and her eyes and believed they saw a demon to be slain. It had happened many times before, the simple act of being hunted, but this was something wholly new.

Just like Pigsy said: it was a show. She was a monster, a vicious, terrible thing, and they wanted the world to see. It was deliberate, purposeful, the way they goaded her into attacking, the way they drew her blood so that she might draw theirs. It was a masterpiece, a grand performance, and when she shoved them down and fled for her life it was to a rising chorus of voices shouting for her head.

She escaped, yes, but not before the whole town saw her face and knew it was synonymous with ‘monster’.

Because, of course, that was his plan.

He wanted her to escape, wanted her to survive. He’d counted on her instincts being as sharp as they were, her powers and her reflexes to overpower the drug that tried to make her useless.

His men wanted her dead. Wanted to have a little fun and then carve her up into pieces — humans, she’d learned, could be more brutal than any demon, given a taste of blood — but he wouldn’t allow it.

“Let her go,” he’d ordered as he threw her to their mercies. “She’s no good to us dead.”

And so it was. If she was dead, she was gone and could never be used again. They needed her alive, a figurehead to remind the people of the dangers in growing complacent: _Don’t forget,_ they were saying, _your lives are in our hands_.

Her life, too. But only as long as it was useful.

Strange — only not strange at all — how someone always caught sight of her at around the same time Locke’s popularity took a dive. Even stranger — even less strange — how it always seemed to happen when there was a crowd nearby, eager witnesses to the way she struggled and resisted and fought, the wild-animal desperation, the demon-like madness in her eyes, the hunger, the pain, the rage.

He was, she had to admit, a strategic genius.

A victory for everyone, yes? Locke’s reputation soared, higher and higher with each new display, and his own along with it. Complaints grew fewer, dissatisfaction was cowed; with proof of a real threat, the monster lurking below the town, the people began to accept what Locke and her guards had told them from the start: that their protection was needed, that the price was worth paying.

The people started to feel safe, at least as much as they could with a monster of a different kind breathing down their necks and pocketing their coin. Locke’s wealth grew, and so did her palace, and Pigsy lived a happy, well-fed life right at the top.

And Sandy...

Well. So long as she was needed, she got to stay alive, surviving each encounter by some miracle or twist of fate, escaping into the shadows and living to see another day.

He gave her that, at least.

Never mind the bruises. Never mind the blood, the concussions, the broken bones. Hers or theirs, what did it matter? What did it matter, too, if it sometimes belonged to their precious audience, spectators or passers-by who happened to be nearby when these little incidents occurred? So much the better, to bleed out a little more fear.

Never mind all the collateral damage, either. Her body, her sanity, her freedom. Never mind the bodies and souls of those who got in the way, the people she hurt in her desperation and fear. Never mind that she was hated, never mind the cruel words or the brutality, never mind that they tore her down again and again, made her over and over into something she never was and never wanted to be. 

She was the demon, she was the monster, the one who needed to be slain. So the people were shown, and so they believed. Never mind the other monsters, the more dangerous ones, counting their gold right under their noses.

A scapegoat, just like he wanted.

“Good to see you’re still alive,” he remarked, some years later, on one of the rare occasions he deigned to join the fray himself.

Sandy howled and threw herself at him, blind with rage and pain, because this was not _living_.

Pigsy, being bigger and considerably more well-fed, knocked her aside without a thought: a sweep of his rake, wide and powerful, and down she went, too dazed to even try to get back up.

He never even needed to touch her.

And he never did again.

*

Not until now.

Now, apparently, they’re friends. Heroes, teammates. Both on the same side, both on the same quest, serving the same monk, seeking together to rid the world of the demons who so drastically affect all their lives. They are the same now, she and he, and that means—

It means he can touch her now, and it will not be a problem.

It is not—

She promised Tripitaka it wouldn’t be a problem.

She promised herself.

For years, she lived under his heel, twisted into something she was never meant to be. For years she had no choice but to be a demon, a monster, a scapegoat. All those years, he made sure she was hunted and hated and hurt, watched her suffer and never raised a hand because it served him to let others bleed in his place. All those years of darkness and despair, of feeling the lash of their fear and their pain, their anger so like hers, all those years of feeling her side and theirs, of feeling his eyes on her, of feeling helpless... and now that it’s finally over she will not allow herself to feel that way again.

She won’t allow him to make her—

No more. Never, ever, ever again.

When she returns to their camp, some time after Tripitaka, she keeps to herself. She doesn’t speak to anyone, doesn’t invite conversation or connection of any kind. She sits herself back down, staying near to their newly filled waterskins, drawing comfort from the closeness of so much water. She breathes in the clean, damp air, swallows down the last of her bad feelings, then picks up the knot of wood, draws her knife, and goes back to whittling without a word.

Tripitaka looks a little worried, but he keeps his thoughts to himself.

Monkey is smart enough to hold his tongue as well. Glancing up, Sandy can see him chewing the inside of his cheek, biting down on whatever comment wants to cut itself loose; it clearly takes a great deal of restraint for him to keep his thoughts to himself and Sandy appreciates it. Whatever he may feel about her personally, Monkey is perceptive enough to recognise something that shouldn’t be treated lightly, and thoughtful enough not to push.

Pigsy...

“Hey.”

Pigsy, apparently, is neither of those things, and he clearly has no idea what’s good for him.

Sandy is not surprised, only disappointed and deeply exhausted.

“We have water,” she tells him, in a voice that invites no further discussion. “Whether it’ll be enough to see us through the barren lands, I can’t say. But we have some, at least.”

“Right. Yeah, the little monk mentioned it.”

Sandy doesn’t look up. “You’re welcome.”

“Yeah.” He coughs. “I mean, um, thank you?” 

“Mm.”

She clenches her jaw. Keeps her eyes on the wood, on the knife, pretends that everything is the way it was before. Pretends he never touched her, pretends she never responded, pretends—

“So.” His breath, a sort of gulping sigh, seems as loud as an earthquake. “About... that is, about before...”

Against her command, Sandy’s fingers tighten on the handle of her knife. Her jaw starts to ache. “No.”

She’s still not looking at him, but she can sense his responses well enough, his vast form shifting the earth underneath him, the force of his presence turning the air thick; it seems to congeal in her lungs, cloying and unbreathable, like the smoke they used to subdue her, the roiling unconsciousness and the heady vertigo of coming around.

“I just wanted to say—” 

“I know what you want to say.” She sets down the wood, unable to focus on it any more, but keeps the knife in her hands. They’re shaking, entirely useless, but it helps just the same to keep the blade close, sharp enough to cut through things other than wood. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Ah.” He’s a little taken aback. Further proof, if needed, that he understands nothing, and her least of all. “Well, uh... okay, then. If that’s what you, er...”

Sandy ignores him. Blocks him out because she has to, because if she doesn’t she will do something all four of them will regret. His voice is making her head throb, and the easy rumble of his breathing makes hers stutter and catch, makes her feel like she’s suffocating.

It is so very difficult to hold onto herself when he’s standing there staring at her, so hard to remember how far she’s come in the years since he cornered her and turned her into a monster, how much she’s changed and grown, how well she survived, despite his best efforts.

She is powerful. She is deadly and dangerous, and she has enough violence in her to destroy a continent. She could so easily have become the demon he said she was, the kind that could tear a town from its foundations and tear its people limb from limb without hesitation or remorse. She could so easily have allowed herself to give in to the darkness, become the nightmare they all thought she was. She could so easily have lost herself, her name and her identity and her soul, but she never did.

She was stronger than that. She was better than he wanted her to be, and braver than he dared to be himself, and she would not give him the satisfaction of being right.

She still won’t.

No matter what she wants to do, no matter how much she feels, no matter how much of a problem this could become: she will not allow it. No matter how angry he makes her, no matter what he says or does, no matter even if he touches her, she will not turn the knife on him again. She will not slip it between his ribs, will not watch him bleed like his lackeys did to her, she will not—

“We should sleep,” she says, and lurches unsteadily to her feet.

She turns away, as swiftly as she trusts herself to move, and peers past the treeline into the darkest shadows she can find. Ostensibly to look for predators lurking in the brush; really it’s just as an excuse to turn away, to escape the sorrowful look on Tripitaka’s face as he hears the things she did not say.

“Sandy...”

To escape, too, the pain in his voice, the ache of yearning to understand something that no human ever should.

“The barren lands are treacherous,” she says. “If you want us to face them tomorrow, we need to be well rested.”

Tripitaka exhales, a shaking sort of sigh that makes Sandy think of rising smoke — campfire smoke, the good and healthy kind of smoke, no drugs or destruction there — and the promise of warmth. It makes her brace too, almost against her will; that sigh usually precedes words, gentleness and compassion and that too-human desire to help.

All things she could not bear right now. All things that would destroy her if he let them out, if he got close enough to reach her with them, close enough to _touch_ —

But he doesn’t get the chance.

Instead, an interruption from Monkey: “She’s right, you know.”

Unexpected, but definitely not unwelcome, all things considered.

Sandy manages a shaky, desperate laugh. “I am sometimes.”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t let it go to your head.”

He’s grinning when she turns to look at him. A little more strained than usual, like he’s trying too hard to look like he’s not actually trying at all, still it’s a comfort next to the way Pigsy grins, casual and careless, churning in her stomach. A comfort, also, next to Tripitaka’s soft sorrow, his ache to help, the way it only makes things worse.

For Monkey, Sandy finds a smile without much effort.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she says, almost comfortably.

He lounges beside her while the others start cleaning and stowing away their cooking things. His presence, massive in a very different way to Pigsy’s, makes a pleasant distraction from the secretive murmur of their voices as they work, and from the unsubtle way they glance at her between every other word. Like she doesn’t know exactly what they’re talking about. Like she doesn’t—

No matter. She can’t make out the words, but she can hazard a pretty good guess at what they’re saying. It sours her stomach, makes her fingers clench again around the hilt of her knife, and makes her more grateful than usual for Monkey’s broad shoulders and his smug, arrogant grin.

“You can put that thing away now,” he says, cocking his head at the little blade.

Sandy’s hand twitches. Her smile, easy just a moment ago, fades completely.

“I’d rather keep hold of it,” she mutters. “Could be anything lurking out there.”

“Please. You’ve got _me_ standing watch.” He flexes, all exaggerated power and self-satisfaction. “You really think there’s anything that can make it past the Monkey King?”

Of course not. Still...

“We haven’t known each other very long,” Sandy points out. “I’m still learning your strengths.”

_And weaknesses,_ she doesn’t add.

Smart as he is, he picks up on it anyway. “Just because I’m a little rusty,” he pouts, “doesn’t mean I couldn’t stomp flat anything that came after me. Demon or otherwise.”

This last is pointed, and aimed squarely at her. Sandy rolls her eyes. “If you say so.”

“I do say so.” He flexes again, a subtle little shift like a warning. “So don’t get any ideas about trying anything stupid. You know, if I were to do something like _this_ —”

And quick as a whip, he leans in and flicks her forehead with two fingers.

Sandy’s reflexes kick in automatically. He must have known they would, must have known she would react, respond, must have realised that she would—

Again, she’s on her feet. This time she knows exactly what she’s doing.

Left arm thrown up to knock his hand out of the way. Right leg sweeping long, catching him cleanly behind the knees. A low hum bubbling in her throat when he grunts and goes down.

It is a thousand worlds away from the violence she felt with Pigsy. Nothing like loss of control, the sickly tang of blood in her mouth, pain and brutality, her mind going foggy and blank—

Nothing like that at all.

It is...

By her standards, it is almost playful.

She’s not sure she really knows what the word means. ‘Playful’, the word for something innocent, something harmless. Certainly nothing she was ever allowed to be.

Possibly it’s not the right word. She doesn’t know. But she does know that when Monkey looks up at her and laughs, she has enough left of herself that she laughs a little too.

The knife, still in her right hand, remains solid and steady and wholly unused.

He notices it too. He lets her help him up, hauling him back to his feet with her free hand, but his eyes never leave the blade, or the fingers wrapped around its hilt. Assessing, thoughtful, but without judgement. Curious, like a soldier weighing up a potential enemy.

Like a god, perhaps, sizing up a potential friend.

Sandy doesn’t flinch under his scrutiny as she would under Tripitaka’s. She doesn’t bare her teeth or growl as she would to Pigsy. She lets him watch her, and watches him in turn, and there is nothing more to the moment than that: the two of them watching each other, warrior to warrior.

Interesting.

After a long beat, Monkey dusts himself down and remarks, “Good control.” 

Sandy tilts her head, fingering the edge of the blade. “Thank you.”

“Mm.” His expression flickers. “Good to know you’re actually capable of it.”

“Good to know you’re capable of accepting defeat,” Sandy counters.

“It wasn’t _defeat_.” Or maybe he’s not. “I was just testing your reflexes. Had to see if there’s anything to worry about, what with that short fuse of yours.”

Sandy’s jaw clenches. Her fingers skirt close to the point of the blade. “It’s not a problem,” she tells him.

“Yeah, I got that.” He waves a hand, dismissing the incident as the almost-playfulness it was. “Whatever, right?”

“Mm.”

She watches his shoulders tighten, watches his lips twitch, the barely-perceptible upward curve. A warning, broadcasting his intentions, a fraction of a second’s notice so she can shut him down before he moves again, if she so chooses.

She doesn’t.

So he does.

He barks another laugh, then lunges at her, slow and lazy.

Playful. The very definition of the word.

Sandy recognises it for the cover it is, a brief brawl to bring their bodies closer. An excuse to throw himself into her personal space, in a way he knows won’t upset her.

It should bother her, she thinks, that he knows it won’t. But it doesn’t.

Because she understands. It is easier for a body like hers, shaped by violence and terrified of tenderness, to respond to this kind of physicality. To dart back as he lunges, to block and counter his lazy, sluggish swings, to dance around him and let him dance around her.

To draw close enough to speak in whispers, without the others noticing.

“We were both locked up in that stinking prison,” he says, his breath warm against her ear. “You think I trust him any more than you do?”

Sandy doesn’t resist the closeness. Her body is on edge, automatic after so many years associating this kind of thing with brutality, but it does not respond to Monkey the way it does to Pigsy, or even to Tripitaka. He would never do the things they do; he’d never shower her with kindness that she cannot swallow down, and he would never use her body as a weapon like—

Well, okay, so maybe he did try that once.

The first time they met, he put his staff to her throat, bent her backwards, and tried to rend her spirit from her body by force.

She remembers the way her vision clouded. Remembers the way it hurt.

It’s not like she doesn’t have any reason to associate him with violence.

It’s just...

Different.

She’s not sure she fully understands why. It just is.

In any case, his staff is tucked away in his hair, and she still has her knife in hand. Sometimes the little blade is more effective than the big one, especially against an ill-prepared opponent. If he tries anything, she can have it between his ribs in the space of a breath.

This close, for all his immense power, he’d be no safer than Pigsy. A twist of her wrist, a flash and a slash, and—

The vision fills her head, unbidden. His body on the ground, her standing over him, blood soaking the grass, soaking her hands, soaking his clothes...

She could do it. Without a thought, perhaps without even meaning to, she could—

She closes her eyes, catches her breath, forces the thought to the back of her mind.

“What are you saying?” she asks him, willing her sticky mouth to shape words.

Monkey nods, a minute twitch of his head that could mean anything. “I don’t trust any god who’d lock up others of his kind,” he says in a low, dangerous growl. It’s personal, she can tell, and deeply so. “Least of all some puffed-up idiot who goes to bed with demons. You understand?”

“I think so.”

Still, he makes the point out loud, so they can both be certain. “Just thought it’d help you to sleep better, knowing I’d be keeping a keen eye on the big lug anyway.” He pauses, drawing back just enough to study her closely. “Even if you hadn’t had your little freak-out thing earlier, I mean.”

“Oh.” It takes a long moment for all of that to sink in, for Sandy to register the words through the haze still clinging to her mind. “I see.”

He nods again, looking dreadfully pleased with himself. No doubt he thinks there’s comfort to be found in that, knowing that the great and powerful Monkey King shares her mistrust of their companion, knowing that he will be watching Pigsy just as closely as she does, knowing that he will be there to stand watch, to keep guard, to _protect_ —

She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that it’s no kind of comfort at all.

“So there you go,” he’s saying, dancing back out of her personal space. “You can put that thing away now. And stop sleeping with it under your pillow, for pity’s sake. It’s _weird_.”

So saying, he gives her forehead one last playful flick, and leaps out of reach before she can react.

*

It stays with her. She doesn’t know why.

The mnemonic _ping_ of contact, the fleeting discomfort, the surging of her old survival instincts, how easily she smothered them. The moment, moments before, when she almost didn’t.

When she imagined, so vividly...

She’s not sure why it sticks, the image of her knife between his ribs, of his body on the ground and hers standing over it like the shadow of death.

By her usual standards, it’s not even a particularly violent image. She’s experienced far worse over the years, unwanted and unbidden, flashes of horrors so vivid and visceral they drive her down to her knees. Revenge fantasies against those who want to harm her, hateful thoughts about those whose only crime was to glance her way, hate and hurt and hate and hurt, filling her head until it’s ready to burst.

It is not unusual, to be struck by such horrible visions in moments of adrenaline, of fear or pain or physicality.

It’s not unexpected, given what those things usually mean.

It’s just...

It’s new, she supposes, because they don’t mean that. Not any more.

It makes the violence in her head seem worse, somehow, that it comes to her now. Her life is no longer in danger, the bodies sharing her space are friends, not enemies. She is—

She is _safe_ here. She does not need those thoughts to survive.

She hates that they’re still there. That they still come to her, unbidden and uninvited and unwanted.

She hates—

Monkey is a good companion. She feels safer with him than anyone else. Even Tripitaka, because Monkey doesn’t feel things so deeply, and he doesn’t try to wrap her up in those feelings, scorching and searing her skin like a blanket made of knitted fire.

She enjoys spending time with Monkey, even physically. He doesn’t make her feel threatened, he doesn’t make her feel unsafe; in truth he doesn’t make her feel much of anything at all.

Even when he’s shoving himself into her personal space, it’s still playful. Even when he’s laughing or teasing her, even when he’s flicking her forehead — _touch_ , no less invasive than Pigsy’s or Tripitaka’s, but it feels like something completely different — still she feels nothing. Even when he’s trying to get a rise out of her, even when he’s trying to make her react, make her respond, make her—

She almost did.

Didn’t.

But almost did.

And that...

She knows it’s what he was testing for. She knows it means something, that she didn’t.

But it bothers her that she still could have. That she still _saw_ —

That she had to stop herself. That she had to close her eyes, banish the vision by force.

She’s not supposed to be like that any more. She’s not supposed to feel those things.

Not about Monkey. Not about Tripitaka. Not about any of the random or not-so-random humans and demons and gods they’ll inevitably meet on the quest. Her instincts, the way her body understands only violence and brutality... these things are for Pigsy alone. He, who made her that way, who — with a few clever words and a little sleight of hand — transformed a young god with a maybe-good spirit into a dark-dwelling demon, a monster with blood on her hands.

Tripitaka said it himself: it’s not supposed to be about _touch_. It’s supposed to be about _him_.

She shouldn’t be gripping her knife even harder now. Shouldn’t be watching those visions flash across her mind again and again and again, the phantom sensation of Monkey flicking her face and cackling, ducking, dodging, dancing away, oblivious to the terrible things she was thinking just a moment ago.

Harmless. Playful. She knows this. Had fun, even, or as close to it as she can. She doesn’t understand—

Or perhaps she does. Perhaps she simply doesn’t want to.

It is so easy to hate Pigsy, to bevel down all her anger and fear and pain into a singular point, to make him its focus. It is so easy to remember the gentleness of his touch and his eyes, so easy to remember the way he transformed, compassion turning cold, kindness turning cruel, the way he switched off the softness without a thought. Easy, far too easy, to blame him for everything she became, everything that happened to her and everything she did; easy to blame that moment, the twisting of a single touch from something that might bring comfort to something that could only bring pain.

He made her into a monster. As his touches hardened, so did she: he made her cold and cruel too, made her into something they could hate.

But no-one had ever needed any help in hating her before. And his guards certainly weren’t the first to try and spill her blood.

She knows this. In her bones, her blood, she knows this.

But there is so much noise inside her head, and so much fear and anger and _pain_. And he is here, he is present and solid and real, and he talks to her and he grins at her and he _touches_ her—

And it is so, so easy to hate him.

Contrary to Monkey’s instruction, she sleeps again with the knife in her hand.

Not under her pillow — they have none out here in the forest, and she wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway — but with her all the same. Her one tether to what is familiar, like a security blanket or a child’s favourite toy, it feels less like she is holding it and more like it is holding her.

Stupid, perhaps. But still.

She’s not afraid of being caught unawares. Not by demons or animals, and certainly not by Pigsy or Tripitaka. A lifetime in the dark has taught her well, how to stay alert even when she rests. She never sleeps more than halfway, never closes her eyes completely; the slightest shift or shuffle, and she would be awake and alert in a heartbeat. Knife in one hand, scythe in the other, no assailant would stand a chance.

In any case, they’re safe out here.

Here, for perhaps the first time in her life, she has no reason to be afraid of anything.

And she’s not.

Not in any way she can give a name to, anyway. Fear is a familiar flavour, a second skin, thick and roughened by years of wear and damage; she would recognise it anywhere, and she knows that what is inside her now doesn’t carry that name. Her body is still. Her heart, her lungs, all of her, completely still.

She is not afraid.

She just...

She needs something to hold on to. She needs to—

She doesn’t know how to be safe.

She doesn’t know how to _not_ sleep with a weapon in her hand.

Even if Pigsy wasn’t there too.

But he is. And that makes it—

She’s not sure if ‘worse’ is the right word.

It makes her body respond in ways it never did before, ways it never had the freedom to. The veil between _is_ and _was_ , between suffering and having once suffered, looking back at the life she lived — the life he carved out for her, piece by piece, out of something nearly as bad — and recognising it as something past.

He is her friend now.

She is...

She _has_ survived.

What she _is_ , she no longer knows.

Perhaps he does.

Perhaps Tripitaka does. The little monk with the big name, the most holy name, who was raised by the Scholar, who understands so much but not as much as he thinks he does. Tripitaka, who is so sure he understands the kind of touch that might cause a god to raise her hands in violence against someone who should be a ‘friend’. Tripitaka, who is so desperate to understand, so desperate to help.

Sandy doesn’t want help.

Not from anyone, but especially not from him.

What she wants is far simpler.

She wants her hands to stop shaking when she holds her scythe or her knife; she wants them to stop shaking even harder when she’s holding nothing at all. She wants the pains in her chest to recede, wants to lessen the effort of trying to breathe slowly, the strain of holding her body in absolute stillness. She wants to be able to sleep — that is, to sleep well and properly, and wake up rested — not drowse with one eye always open and a blade pressed against her face, not hyper-alert and constantly vigilant, even with the Monkey King standing watch just a few short paces away.

Tripitaka is already sleeping. Sleeping well, sleeping properly, sleeping deeply and peacefully. Sandy can’t fathom such a thing, and from him most of all. He has endured so much horror and heartbreak, and so recently, she doesn’t understand how he can simply close his eyes and sleep.

She has never been able to do that. Even knowing that she was well hidden, safe among the shadows in the sewers, even knowing perfectly well that there was no chance of discovery. She has never slept in any way other than this, fully attuned to every breath, every sound, every detail of the world around her. So many little things, even in an empty sewer: the drip and rush of water, the faint shafts of moonlight from above, the rats scratching and gnawing at the walls, at the floor, at her. Nothing escaped her notice, even when she was at rest.

It is the only kind of sleep she’s ever known: the kind that is actually awake.

And that was before she made her bed among friends who were once enemies. Before she found herself leagues away from the nearest sewer, the nearest shadows, the nearest sanctuary.

Now...

She’ll never understand how Tripitaka and the others manage it.

She’s not sure she really wants to.

To let go of the instincts that have kept her alive for so long...

That kept her safe from the likes of _him_...

She would give up almost anything for the quest, for Tripitaka and the memory of the Scholar who showed her a way out of the darkness. he would give up her name, her identity, what few pieces yet remain of her soul and her spirit. But she’s not sure she will ever be able to give up that. She’s not sure she would recognise herself if she did.

So she clutches the knife in both hands, keeps her eyes open until her vision starts to blur, and resists sleep like it’s a noose waiting to tighten around her neck.

Pigsy, on the other side of the fire, is snoring like an earthquake. Arrhythmic and stuttering, the sound cuts straight through her. Every night the same thing: he sleeps the sleep of the dead, practically unwakeable, while she lies awake haunted not by a fear of what he might do to her if she lets herself sleep too, but of what she might do to him if her self-control wavers.

Far worse than what little she did to him tonight.

Far worse than what she imagined she might do.

What she _wanted_ —

The violence left its marks on more than just her body; it dug its claws into more than just flesh and bone. Her head is filled with the most horrific, unspeakable things, and she can’t remember which ones are real and which are illusory, which ones were done to her, which ones she did to others, and which ones have thus far remained locked up tight in the cages of imagination. She only knows that when she looks at Pigsy now — a friend, whatever that means, on the path to redemption — she sees all of them, all at once.

The knife, in her hands, is shaking. Her whole body is—

Above her, a few paces away, Monkey clears his throat.

Sandy wants to ignore him, but she can’t. A lifetime of attunement to everything around her has left her unable to swallow down the instinct to react, to rise to the bait, to turn to face him.

“What do you want?” she growls, rather more loudly than she intended.

The others don’t stir. Sandy is thankful for that, and all the more so when Monkey bares his teeth, hitching up the corners of his lips in one of his most insufferable smirks.

“Put that thing away,” he tells her, in a low hiss. “You’re being stupid.”

She knows this; she also doesn’t care.

Stubborn, she clutches it even tighter.

He smirks more, and cocks his thumb at his hair, at the staff nestled there in its hairpin form. A threat, or simply a warning: if she doesn’t relinquish the knife by choice, he will barge into her personal space and relieve her of it by force.

Sandy would like to see him try.

She sits up, holding the knife in front of her, twisting it from a weapon to a tool, a point to an edge. It’s no longer about protection, the need to hold it and keep it close, the need to feel safe; now it’s about defying Monkey, about being more stubborn than he is, about antagonising and annoying him just as she always does. It’s something new, something sort of softer — soft, at least, in what little way she can stomach it — and the handle doesn’t dig so painfully into her palm when she tilts it and turns the blade upwards, letting it catch the moonlight and reflect it into his face.

The smirk falls off Monkey’s face; now it’s his turn to glare.

Not only glare: his staff is out in the blink of an eye, fully extended, and his teeth are as sharp as the edge of her weapon.

Sandy doesn’t stand. She stays where she is, watches silently as he strides towards her, playful and feigning meanness.

His approach is a good distraction from the other things, the gentle whispers of the world around her and the not-gentle not-whispers of Pigsy’s snoring.

A good excuse, too, if she wanted one, to discard the knife in favour of a keener blade, her scythe just a hand’s space away, within easy reach as it always is. She could have it in hand as quick as he drew his staff, ready to counter anything he throws at her, ready to turn this battle of wills into something a little more tangible, a little more real, a little closer to the world she knows.

Tempting. But she doesn’t do it.

She doesn’t do anything. Just sits there, letting him draw close, letting him just skirt the edge of her personal space, letting him move in close enough that he could probably reach her with his staff if he really wanted to.

What does it say about this new life, she wonders, that she knows he won’t?

That Monkey — for all the ways he claims to dislike her, all the ways he insists she’s worthless dead weight — knows and understands and recognises the wildness in her. That he knows what she’s capable of, that he knows what she—

That it is the middle of the night and here they are again, playing at a violence that they both know isn’t real.

She wonders if he holds as much of the real stuff under his skin as she holds under hers.

She would never ask, and in any case she doesn’t get the chance.

He’s hovering on the invisible line between _safe_ and _not_ , between his space and hers, and his eyes gleam like diamonds in the dark. Challenging but not threatening, dangerous but not deadly; a show, a performance, a game. Sandy is a breath away from inviting him in, encouraging the moment, the clash of ill-fitting weapons, the burst of adrenaline and power, the ease of physical communication through roughness. She is a breath away from accepting it, from letting it happen, and—

And then Pigsy rolls over with a thundercloud snort and mutters, “Oi, now...”

His voice is thick, the heavy-weighted slur of someone talking in their sleep.

Still, even knowing that he poses no threat, Sandy feels her body tense. Her senses sharpen, alert to his voice, his body, his presence, and she presses her thumb against the flat of the blade, instinct making her seek out the contact, the protection, the comfort of cold steel.

“Go back to sleep,” she hisses under her breath. “Go back to sleep, go back to sleep...”

Pigsy grunts, as though responding to the sound of her voice. “Bloody noisemakers,” he grouches. “Put a sock in it, now, or I’ll call the guard.”

Sandy’s thumb slips, catching the edge of the blade. Blood wells, a bite of pain, keen as a memory.

Monkey, recognising her reaction for what it is, dances back from the invisible line. Out of her space, away from her, back to where it’s safe for them both.

“Don’t listen to him,” he says in a low voice. “Idiot’s dreaming.”

Sandy knows that. She does. But—

But her hand is shaking, the knife slipping in her grip, and she knows it’s only a matter of time before she draws more blood, and maybe not so accidentally.

It is so much harder than it should be, breathing through the burst of mnemonic pain, old blood that somehow feels much fresher than the little moonlit beads dripping from her thumb. It is harder than it should be just to breathe at all, to navigate a path through the overgrown weeds of anger and pain, of being hurt and hated and hunted, of feeling lost and wild and so—

_No_.

She is not afraid.

She—

She grips the knife tighter.

And there it is, just as she knew it would be: more blood. Another few droplets from her thumb, and then a clumsy slash across her palm; the blood beads black in the moonlight, in no small quantity. Accidental, she tells herself, but her shaking hands tell a different story.

Better hers than his, she thinks. Better her own than someone who doesn’t deserve—

He taught her that. He made sure she learned it over and over and over.

“Go back to your watch,” she whispers to Monkey. “I’m not going to put it down.”

He doesn’t answer. He’s staring, paralysed, at the blood on her hand.

On the other side of the fire, Pigsy is still talking. “Likely to be a bloody riot,” he babbles to himself, “if we don’t do something about it soon.”

Sandy does not growl. She does not draw any more blood, not from herself or from him. She breathes, she swallows, she clings to her fraying control, her fraying sanity.

With an obvious force of will, Monkey tears his gaze from her hand.

“Right,” he says, pulling them both back from the brink. “Enough of this. I got your back, okay? Get some sleep, if you can.”

_If you can_. Because even he, in his infinite arrogance, must realise that’s not going to happen now.

Still, he retreats, hopping neatly over the fire and returning to his post like that was his intention all along. Like nothing happened. Like Sandy isn’t still dripping blood onto the grass, like Pigsy isn’t still talking in his sleep, his razor-blade voice carving up the night, like—

Sandy exhales in a rush, gulping air as the space around her expands in his absence. Was she holding her breath? She feels very light-headed, so maybe she was.

“I will,” she says to Monkey, the lie as clean as a slash with her knife, her scythe, her fists. “Thank you.”

If he is confused by the oddly-timed gratitude — for what, even she couldn’t say — he doesn’t let it show.

He just shrugs, grins, then turns away and says with effortful effortlessness, “No problem.”

Sandy closes her eyes, swallows down the phantom taste of blood, and tries to convince herself that it’s true.

*


	3. Chapter 3

*

By morning, her hand is almost completely healed.

This, naturally, doesn’t stop Tripitaka from fussing.

He drags her back to the stream to clean it, tutting and tsking and shaking his head, making such a fuss over nothing that Sandy feels almost like a child again, squirming under the scrutiny of a disapproving parent.

“This is pointless,” she complains. “I don’t need—”

“I’m sure it is,” Tripitaka interrupts, with maddening, monkish cheerfulness. “But we’re about to head out into a place with no fresh water, no natural resources, and no healers. I don’t want to take any chances.”

A wise measure, usually. Certainly would be if she were human. But she’s not, and in any case...

“It’s practically mended,” Sandy insists, shaking out her hand so he won’t see how badly it’s twitching. “You’re wasting precious time on an unnecessary precaution.”

“Maybe.” His expression darkens for a beat, nervousness and worry that he swiftly smothers with another cheery smile. “But humour me, all right?”

She tries to. Sincerely, she does. But then they reach the stream, and he looks up at her with those too-bright, too-soft eyes, and he reaches for her with open hands and upturned palms, and the sharpness rises up in her again as if it never left at all.

“I can do it myself.”

It is almost a growl. Almost a snarl, a hiss, a threat. It is—

It is almost violent.

She draws her hands behind her, protective and dangerous, and the way they ball into fists the moment they’re out of his sight, the way she steps back and back and _back_...

That is almost violent too.

Trapped violent. Cornered violent. The kind of violence that needs only a word, a thought, a breath before it explodes, before it tears and tortures and takes.

There’s no place for that kind of violence here.

Tripitaka is not Pigsy. He is holy, he is precious, he is everything. He’s the reason there’s still blood in her veins and breath in her lungs, the reason her heart is still beating, the reason her spirit, weakened and fractured and twisted as it is, still endures. She survived for him, she lived and lives in his name. She trusts him completely, absolutely, with every part of herself.

But this...

This is beyond him. It’s beyond even her. It is instinct, it is reflex, it is a lifetime of experiences she wants so desperately to forget, and even he — even she, with all her devotion and faith — cannot keep those things from rushing back to the surface every time she sees an open hand.

He’s staring at her. Sad, yes, and disappointed, but not surprised. Like he knew this would happen and sorely wished it wouldn’t.

She doesn’t know why that makes her want to cry, why it makes her want to run away, disappear, hide herself away, to become a ghost once more, like she was for all those years. Self-protection, perhaps, from the sorrow in his eyes and the softness in his hands, still outstretched, still reaching for a contact she cannot give. Self-protection from the opposite of violence, the way he isn’t angry, the way he never gets angry, the way he—

The way he still, even now, just wants to help.

She doesn’t want his help. She doesn’t want—

He lowers his hands. Takes a long step back.

Unnecessary, but thoughtful. Sandy has put enough space between them, but still he makes the effort to show he respects it. Making a point, no doubt, to let her know that she’s safe with him, that he will heed her needs even if he doesn’t entirely understand them.

Even if _she_ doesn’t.

He’s trying to make her feel safe. It’s not right, not fair, that it has the opposite effect.

“Okay,” he says, in that gentle Scholar-like voice of his. “If you’d prefer it that way.”

Sandy wills her fists to crack open.

It’s much harder than it should be. Harder still to draw them back out into the open, to show off the tension rippling under the skin, to expose to the sunlight the thin little lines where the knife caught the skin. A couple of little snicks across her thumb, the slash across her palm, all of them faded now and pale with god-healing. They’re not wounds by any definition; they never were. Tripitaka is being ridiculous, imagining that they are.

Still, for him...

She sighs, and plunges both hands into the stream.

She spends more time than she needs to, holding them under the water. Submerged, letting the water pour in through all the cracks and creases, seeping into the skin and staying there, safe below the surface, touching and balming all the places that might have been wounded once but aren’t any more. It brings her comfort, soothing in ways Tripitaka can’t possibly comprehend, ways that have nothing to do with his stupid fears of wounds that never existed.

“Okay?” Tripitaka asks, not coming closer.

Sandy grunts. “Completely unnecessary.”

He chuckles, the sound carrying rather more lightness than the look on his face. “You think I’m fretting. Being over-protective. Being—”

“Ridiculous,” Sandy finishes, with no tact whatsoever.

Thankfully, Tripitaka only laughs again. “I know, I know. And you’re probably right.” His shrug offers a small measure solace; at least he knows there’s no sense in any of this. “But you have to understand: I don’t have a lot of experience with gods. I’m used to humans. So if I worry too much, it’s only because I...”

 _Don’t say it,_ Sandy thinks, feverish and desperate and panicked. _Don’t say ‘care’, don’t say it, don’t say it, please don’t—_

He doesn’t. Instead he stops speaking entirely, brows knitting together in a sudden, peculiar frown.

Sandy doesn’t understand. Then she glances down, sees the water seething and frothing with bubbles, and does.

“Clearly,” she says, hastily withdrawing her hands, “this stream is possessed by some sort of demon.”

Tripitaka looks pained. “Sandy...”

And he reaches out again with both hands, gentle and hopeful and so kind. 

In that moment, Sandy thinks he is so much like the robes he wears, so much like the vision she held in her head for all those years, so much like the name she held under her tongue and behind her teeth, so much like the Tripitaka she waited for. He is so much a vision of purity and perfection and promise, it almost hurts.

No: it does hurt.

The warmth in her belly is just like the water in the stream, seething and bubbling and threatening to overflow. It hurts too, in a different way, and she doesn’t know if she has the strength to hold it down.

She swallows, unable to tear her gaze from his outstretched hands, the silent plea to touch.

“Do you have to?” she whispers, feeling the water in the stream responding to her emotions.

“No.” He says it instantly, with devastatingly softness, like he’s trying to calm a wild animal. Perhaps he is, at that; Sandy certainly feels like one. “I don’t have to. But I’d like to. If it’s okay?”

Sandy doesn’t know why it’s not okay. She spent years telling herself that she would give anything for him. Her body her spirit, her life, everything would be forfeit the instant he finally appeared.

That hasn’t changed.

Won’t change, not ever. Whatever else she might be, she is still bound to him, and she honours her promises.

But she is shaking, wildness bubbling and bursting in her chest, the same wildness she sees in the water, the fierce, furious flood surging over the bank, white-capped little waves like microcosms of the sea, and she doesn’t understand where all that violence is coming from, doesn’t understand why she can’t just close her eyes and make it stop.

“Of course,” she hears herself say. “Anything.”

Tripitaka’s smile soothes her mind. Her body—

Her body is not so easily soothed. It hums like living lightning, like the sparks she sees sometimes on the prongs of Pigsy’s rake, waiting for his command to rain havoc on the world below.

Tripitaka takes her hand, the contact so light it’s barely there at all, and Sandy can’t stop herself from whimpering.

He treats her like a wounded animal, perhaps even like a human child, so fragile that the slightest pressure might cause her bones to crack. Running his fingertips along the faded lines where the knife slipped, the pale white-on-white marks where the blood spilled last night. Nothing left of it now, the blood or the marks; as close as he is, surely even he must realise that, surely even he must be satisfied that she is whole, that she was always whole, that there is no blood, no pain, no—

Well. No blood, anyway.

The pain—

She hears it again, Pigsy’s voice in the throes of last night’s dreaming. Hears once more his addled, sleep-fuzzy threat — _‘put a sock in it, or I’ll call the guard!’_ — and the tremors in her body turns to something more visceral as she remembers what those words once meant.

The lightning in her veins catches fire, a jagged thundercrack of sensation and sensitivity that burns all the way through her, the memory of past horrors and the too-real present of safety, sanctuary, softness, of Tripitaka touching her hand with the same delicacy, the same gentle compassion that Pigsy used back then, touching her face and supporting her back, looking at her with familiarity, with kindness, with—

With so many things that only lasted a moment.

She remembers again — and again and again and again — the way it changed, twisted and transformed in the space of a heartbeat, hardening to something cold and cruel, something she would never recover from.

She yanks her hand back.

“See?” Her voice is shaking as hard as her body. “It’s fine.”

Tripitaka takes a small step back.

“Yeah,” he says, a little uneasy. “It is.”

He’s not looking at her hand, though; he’s looking at her face.

Sandy hides behind her hair. “Please,” she whispers, and she doesn’t know what she’s asking for, only that she needs it so desperately she can’t breathe.

“I’m sorry.” He sound so sincere, so desperate to make right. “Should I not have...”

 _Touched you_ , he doesn’t say. And she can’t bring herself to think about the answer.

“You shouldn’t have brought me out here,” she says, the closest approximation she can find to all the turmoil tearing through her: his touch, his voice, his worry, his compassion, each little piece a fresh burst of pain. “I told you that. I told you it was fine. You didn’t have to bring me out here. You didn’t have to try to... to...”

To _help_.

Her voice cracks, shatters. Even if she wanted to say the word, she couldn’t get it out.

He seems to understand that; at least, he looks a little abashed. “I know. But I...”

And he stops. Shuffling his feet, chewing his lip, a hundred little tells to say that this—

That this isn’t what it seems.

Sandy feels the threat of deception like a snake in her gut, coiled and ready to strike.

“But what, Tripitaka?”

He bites his lip a little harder, chewing on it. It makes him look youthful — not so much younger, but sort of smoother at the edges, like how Sandy imagines she herself might have looked some years back, if she’d gone through puberty in a warm monastery and not on the cold, dark streets — and just a little bit vulnerable. Like a student sizing up his teachers, trying to guess how far he can push their patience before it snaps.

Sandy is certainly no teacher. But she is also not someone whose patience should be pushed.

Even by Tripitaka.

She takes a deep breath, and takes control. Controls her voice, her body, her responses. Controls the shaking of her hands, controls the urge to reach for a weapon, or else to simply turn to vapour and disappear entirely. Controls every part of herself so well and so effectively that he must surely see just how close she is to losing control completely.

“Look,” he sighs, after a long moment. “I’ve been hoping for a chance to talk to you in private.”

Sandy’s stomach gives a sharp kick. “Why?” she asks, and means, _what did I do wrong?_

“Because...”

He hesitates.

His hands are twitching now too, clenching and spasming with a kind of restless uncertainty. Like he can’t quite figure out how best to phrase himself. Like he’s afraid of antagonising or upsetting her if he says the wrong thing the wrong way. Like he’s afraid of—

Like he’s afraid of _her_.

All of a sudden, Sandy feels very sick.

“Tripitaka,” she croaks.

He sighs. Then, still wringing his hands, he tries again. “It’s just... you know, we’re going to be out in the barren lands for a while. I don’t know how long, exactly, but a good few days at least.”

“I know.” Sandy tilts her head, genuinely confused. “We discussed this last night, at great length.” She tries to smile, and fails. “If I recall correctly, you were rather upset with Monkey about it.”

“I wasn’t _upset_. He just wouldn’t admit—” He cuts himself off, flushing hotly. “That’s not the point.”

“Oh, good.” She doesn’t particularly care, but focusing on the mundane seems to set his mind a little more at ease; it is worth it, she thinks, for that alone. “So what, then?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.” He turns his face away, ostensibly to gaze into the stream. The water reflects his face, though, and the unease still rippling behind his eyes; Sandy thinks he’s the most terrible hider she’s ever met. “I mean, the barren lands, obviously. But also you. That is, you and the barren lands. And I... that is, you know I don’t know much about gods, so if this is a sensitive subject or something...”

Sandy laughs. Genuinely, sincerely, she laughs. “A sensitive subject?”

“I don’t know.” He’s wincing now, and flushing even hotter; if Sandy didn’t know better, she’d think he was getting defensive. “I haven’t known any of you for very long. I don’t know what might be taboo to a god or not. But I do know... that is, uh, I was _told_...” 

There’s something sharp there, a strange evasiveness. Sandy’s chest burns with unburst bubbles, and Tripitaka’s reflection in the stream begins to seethe as well.

“Told what?” she asks, willing her body to calm down. “And by whom?”

“No-one,” he says, too quickly. Then, recovering himself, “I mean, Monkey. He knows things about gods, right?”

 _Not as much as he wants you to believe,_ Sandy thinks, but keeps that to herself.

“And what,” she says instead, trying desperately to keep her voice steady, “did Monkey have to say about me?”

Tripitaka swallows audibly. “That you might be... uncomfortable. You know, because of your...”

He waves his hands in front of his face, flamboyant and more than a little silly-looking. An attempt, if a rather unflattering one, to emulate her talent for controlling water.

Unimpressed, Sandy thins her lips. “I assume he phrased it more eloquently than that.”

“Uh...” This time, his flush is well earned. “My point is, we thought it might be a good idea to... I mean, I don’t know if it’ll be any help or anything... you know, it’s not like there’s anything we can do about it once we’re out there. But still, we figured, maybe... that is, uh... _here_.”

And he punctuates that stream of incoherent nonsense by tossing a waterskin at her head.

Sandy catches the thing by instinct, not sparing it a thought. “We filled those last night.”

“I know that. He...” He coughs, looking suddenly uneasy. “That is, _we_ thought you might like to keep hold of it. For yourself, I mean.”

He’s not making any more sense now than he was a moment ago, but Sandy is starting to piece things together just the same. Her throat constricts, tension and the looming threat of dehydration, and it takes a great deal of swallowing before she trusts herself to speak.

“You think I’m going to be weakened out there,” she guesses flatly. “You think the lack of water is going to affect me more profoundly than the rest of you. You think I need your _help_ —”

“I didn’t say that,” Tripitaka says. “But I don’t think it’s a bad idea to be prepared. The barren lands are treacherous enough without...”

Sensibly, he chooses not to finish.

Sandy looks down at her hands. Quivering, balled into fists, little bites of pain where her nails dig into her palms. It is an effort to hold them down, to keep them at her sides.

“You weren’t worried about my hand at all.” It’s obvious, now that she thinks about it; not even the most ignorant, ill-informed human would think a few clumsy slashes were worthy of all this. She should have seen this coming, and is furious that she didn’t. She waves the waterskin in his face and goes on, “You just wanted to get me alone so you could give me this.”

Tripitaka has the decency to look guilty. “I thought you’d prefer to discuss it in private.”

As if privacy would make this humiliation easier. As if anything could.

Sandy feels intensely, viscerally uncomfortable talking about her weaknesses, letting them be seen and known. Whatever her feelings about Tripitaka or her fellow gods, that sort of knowledge cannot be unlearned; a twist of fate or a shift in loyalties, and they could be used against her.

Pigsy knew them well enough, didn’t he? And look how well he used them.

“I’d prefer not to discuss it at all,” she says out loud.

“I know you would.” Tripitaka sighs, frustration tempered by understanding, by empathy, by all those things he must realise Sandy can’t stomach. “But we’re part of a team now. And none of us has the luxury of keeping our needs to ourselves. If there’s a chance the absence of water will affect you more than the others, you should have come to me yourself. I shouldn’t have to hear about it from...” He coughs, looking suddenly guilty again. “From others.”

Sandy narrows her eyes. “You mean from Monkey.”

“I mean, uh...” He glances off. “Yeah, Monkey.” 

The deception is laughable. Humiliating, even. If it were something else, Sandy might laugh and offer to teach him how to better hide his truths.

But it’s not, and she knows now what he’s hiding, and why. The truth, the source, the—

The _name_.

It’s right there in the flush on his skin, the shame of being caught, nothing like the gentle, harmless embarrassment of earlier. Right there in the way he won’t meet her eye, the way he probably can’t.

Because he knows how much of a betrayal this is.

He knows enough about it to lie in the first place, to try and hide the truth from someone who is an expert in sensing deceit. He knows enough to think it’s worth trying to get away with it, but apparently not enough to realise that he won’t, that she will always catch a lie.

Especially this lie.

Monkey doesn’t know her. Monkey has only witnessed her powers in action once, and it was hardly a grand demonstration of aquatic fortitude; why would he think twice about them?

Stupid of her, to hear his name and not think, to see it twist on Tripitaka’s lips and not _question_ —

No.

This didn’t come from him. Couldn’t have.

And she is an idiot for not recognising the source sooner, the one member of their little group who does know her well, who is intimately acquainted with the strengths and weaknesses of gods, who would surely grasp the dangers in bringing one with water-attuned powers into a world with none for leagues and leagues and leagues.

 _Stupid_ , she thinks, because it is easier to hate herself for not seeing it than it is to hate Tripitaka for his attempt to deceive her, or to hate Monkey for his ignorance, or to hate—

“Pigsy.”

She has no idea which one of them says it. She can’t hear anything beyond the blood pounding in her ears.

Tripitaka takes a step forward. Just one, but it’s enough to make Sandy lurch back, floundering desperately for her scythe — absent, foolishly left with the others back at their camp — and then her knife.

“Sandy...”

“No.” Fingers shaking, closing around the handle. She won’t draw it, not in front of Tripitaka, but she holds it as tight as she can, clinging to the promise of violence like a lifeline, the only one she has. “No. He knows nothing about me. Do you understand? He knows _nothing_ —”

“He knew enough to warn me that you’d react like this.” Coming from anyone else, that might sound a little smug, but Tripitaka just sounds earnestly, sincerely sad. Like he’d sooner be wrong than right, if it meant less pain. “Sandy, if what he says is true, it shouldn’t matter whether it came from him or Monkey, or even from me. If you need to take precautions before venturing out into a place without natural water—”

“I don’t.” She throws the waterskin back at him, hard enough to send him staggering. “I’m not less of a god than him. Just because I lived like a demon. Just because he _made_ me—”

Her voice catches, the crystalline pain of shattered glass. She remembers the way it felt under her knees, digging into her palms, her cheeks, as fine as the sand that gave her name, glittering like starlight as it burrowed into her skin, in through her wounds, her blue-black blood made as beautiful as uncut diamond.

“No-one’s saying you’re less than anyone,” Tripitaka says, bringing her back to a present no less painful. “Sandy, we all have needs. Gods, humans, all of us.” No doubt it’s quite deliberate that he doesn’t say ‘demons’, sidestepping the one word that defined her for so long. “It doesn’t make you less to admit it.”

Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps it does. Sandy has never been in a position to test those waters.

“Be that as it may,” she rasps, “I won’t have him dictating mine. He’s done enough already.”

Tripitaka doesn’t argue. Couldn’t argue, even if he wanted to. For all his poor choices this morning, he seems able to accept that, at least.

“I understand,” he says instead. “But he means well. Really, he does. He’s trying to make things right, trying to look out for you—”

Sandy’s snarl, animal-wild and deadly, cuts him off mid-word.

“No,” she says.

“Sandy—”

“ _No_.”

Louder, harder, but somehow weaker at the same time. Her voice is shaking now, and the tremors ripple outwards to claim her whole body. She’s shuddering from head to toe, unable to stop it or control it or lessen it, and she doesn’t care that he can see it, doesn’t care that he can probably feel it, the vibrations cutting through the air, boiling the water in the stream, turning it to steam right in front of his eyes.

“Sandy,” he says again, growing softer as she grows louder.

“No.” She shakes her head, but lowers her voice for his sake. “He’s not trying to ‘look out for me’, Tripitaka. He’s trying to assuage his guilty conscience.” It takes more effort than it should, swallowing down the urge to snarl again, to spit his name like his human guards once spat hers. “To make peace with his past atrocities. He made me his scapegoat back then, and he’s doing the same thing again now.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

He doesn’t sound as convinced as he did a moment ago, though, and that bolsters her to press on, pushing a little of the violence out through her teeth to try and ease its grip on her body.

“He knows nothing,” she says again. “And he understands still less. Claiming that he knows my needs simply because he knows that I control water...” She shakes her head, feeling dizzy. “That doesn’t ‘make things right’, Tripitaka. It’s just words, as useless and worthless as every other part of him. It doesn’t undo all those years of... of...”

But she can’t say it. Not without crying. And she will not cry in front of Tripitaka.

She can’t. She won’t. She—

Not that it matters: he still sees it. Even as she holds back all trace of tears, not letting them reach her eyes or stain her face, even as she holds on to control with everything she has in her, still somehow he sees the salt, the sting, the sorrow. Still somehow, he sees _her_ , exactly as she is: scared and small and trying so hard not to cry.

“Sandy...” Her name on his tongue is the gentlest thing in the world, and it hurts like dying. “Sandy, I...”

And there he is, hovering right on the edge of her personal space, just like Monkey did last night. But Monkey recognised the wildness in her, and he knew to stay back; Tripitaka does not. He doesn’t see any of the things that Monkey did — or perhaps he sees them more clearly, so much that he can’t ignore them even when it would be better for them both — and so he glides over that invisible line, the only thing that kept her safe, glides all the way into her personal space, all the way up to where she stands, so close to her unprotected, unsheltered, unsafe body—

And she can’t bear it, the delicate strength as he squeezes her hand, the softness and sweetness as he stretches up to touch her face, the feather-light press of his palm against her jaw, her cheek, her—

She can’t bear the memory of Pigsy touching her too, just like this.

Gentle, tender, careful. So full of compassion. So full of _kindness_.

Right before he turned around and stripped away every memory of all those things.

Right before he made her a monster, undeserving and unworthy.

She rears back, shuddering, biting down on her tongue, swallowing down plea after plea. _Don’t touch me, don’t let me touch you, don’t hurt me, don’t let me hurt you, don’t touch me don’t touch me don’t touch me—_

“I’m going back to camp,” she manages, sounding exactly as strangled as she feels.

She’s turning away almost before she finishes speaking, not wanting him to see her like this: shivering, sweating, swallowing convulsively. She feels like she did after her almost-death at Monkey’s hands, nascently aware of the absurdity of it — a great big powerful god cowering and trembling behind the tiny human who had just saved her life — and yet unable to stop her body from responding to the echoes of pain, of breathlessness, of being on the brink of death.

That is exactly what she feels now: not death, at least not the physical kind, but on the brink of something just as brutal, and just as much beyond her control.

It frightens her. Even in frailty, even when she has no strength to be violent or wild or dangerous, still the loss of control upsets her. More so here with Tripitaka, than back at camp with Pigsy. It’s self-preservation with him, a natural — if unwelcome — response to years of anger and fear and pain in his name, but here with the tiny human who saved her life, the same tiny human she’s sworn to protect...

She needs to get a better handle on herself. That much is becoming abundantly clear.

Behind her, Tripitaka sucks in his breath.

“Sandy,” he says, and though it’s still so soft, so low, so sweet, still it grips her by the chest. On his tongue, her name becomes something powerful, something world-shaking, and she doesn’t know whether to be grateful that she had the chance to hear it sound that way or terrified that someone so small and fragile can hold so much power over her. “Sandy, I know you said that this isn’t a problem, but I really think—”

“I’m going back to camp.” It’s a warning this time. “If I have any ‘needs’ once we’re in the barren lands, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

And she wills her legs into motion, leaving him alone with the seething, surging stream.

*

What angers her the most is that they’re right.

Both of them.

Tripitaka, who sees so much more than she wants him to, who cannot understand but can still see. He is so much like the Scholar, in all his best and worst ways; he can tell at a glance when something really is a problem, when it perhaps needs attention she’s not willing or able to give, but he lacks the understanding to know how to deal with it. He is right, but his methods are wrong, and rather than being soothed and comforted she is only angered.

Pigsy, who sees and understands nothing, who has lived his whole life avoiding the kind of truth she lived. He has no right to talk about her needs, her wants, her weaknesses, no right to go to Tripitaka and tell him.

She is furious with him. Not because he’s wrong, but because he’s right. Because he has seen and handled hundreds of her kind, because he knows more about gods than she ever will, and because he knows her too.

He always did.

She’s sure of that now. Wasn’t always, given how quick he was to label her a demon, but it makes too much sense to ignore it any more: he knew that she was the most likely candidate to be harbouring the Monkey King, he knew how to find them, how to flush them out, and exactly where they would emerge, ripe and ready for him to deceive and capture them.

If he really believed she was a demon, honestly and sincerely, he would never have even entertained such a thought, much less wasted Locke’s precious resources on it. A demon, harbouring a god? Harbouring the greatest god that ever lived? Even she, demon-faced god that she is, knows how unfathomable that would be.

Yet there he was, cornering the three of them because he already knew how to corner her. Because he knew what she was and he knew that she would feel compelled to help.

To show kindness, to show compassion.

As a god is supposed to do to everyone.

As he should have done to her.

Instead he did the opposite: he used her. Twice he used her, twice he twisted her into something that suited him better, never mind what it did to her or anyone else. First he made a demon, a monster to be hunted and abused and held up as an example, the bad kind of demon to make Locke seem like the good kind. Then, when the tides shifted, when she was more valuable as god — the god she really was, the god she’d always been — he turned around and rebuilt her as one of those. The perfect bait to draw out the Monkey King, and a little extra bonus for Locke’s coffers: two for the price of one.

She was never anything more to him than a tool. An object, a creation, a thing to be used and then discarded, twisted and taken, tormented when it suited him and ignored when it didn’t. A platform to elevate Locke and elevate him, no matter that they splintered her bones every time they climbed up onto her back.

She remembers the first time he let her be a god, remembers how it didn’t feel so different at all. Waking up in Locke’s prison with Monkey snoring on the other side of the cell, feeling the drug dissipating from her blood like it had so many times before, she remembers thinking, _oh_.

Did it matter, she wondered, what name they used, when the end result was the same? She was still trapped, still cornered, still being used by the same monsters; only the name had changed, and the purpose.

She remembers thinking, in the few minutes before her mind came back to itself and she was able to sit up, that it was really quite unfair, that she could never win. No matter what they saw, no matter what they called her, no matter what she did or didn’t do; still she always ended up in the same place, with the same stuff in her lungs and the same noise in her head.

She wondered what they would think of her, those faceless, nameless people who spat her name and called her a demon, who feared she would steal their children and their food. She wondered if they would pity her when they finally learned the truth: that she never was the thing they saw, the thing they willed themselves to believe. She wondered if they would feel any remorse for the things they said and did, or the things they felt.

She wondered if it would take away some of the pain, to know that they would.

She wondered if it would ease it too, in a different, sharper sort of way, to know that they wouldn’t. To know that it would never have made a difference, that they would always have hated her, whatever name they used, that she would have always been a monster of some shape or another.

She’d never needed his help to be hated.

Only to be hunted and haunted and hurt.

There were worse fates, she remembers thinking, than being trapped in a prison listening to the Monkey King complain.

Besides, Tripitaka had saved her twice already, first from herself and then from him. Of course he would save her again.

And so he did.

Again and again, the little monk has saved her life. Again and again, he has saved her soul, her spirit, her everything.

And now she can’t bear to let him touch her.

And now her hands shake, balled into fists or gripping the hilt of a deadly weapon. And now she has to turn away from the one person in all the world she’s spent her life waiting to see, or risk being overwhelmed and drowned by the most unspeakable thoughts.

And now, after a lifetime spent waiting for the day she would no longer have to hide, she finds herself unable to stop.

*

Back at camp, she pretends not to hear them talking about her.

They eat a quick, simple breakfast, the four of them together, then spend much longer than they should in clearing away their things. They’re all a little bit on edge about venturing into the barren lands, even those who have no reason to dread the absence of water, and even the usually impatient Monkey seems reluctant to get going. He lingers over his chores, dragging his feet as much as he thinks he can get away with, and his impromptu laziness gives Pigsy and Tripitaka ample time to gossip.

Their lowered voices do nothing to keep their words from carrying. It’s almost as if they’ve forgotten — as everyone always does — that Sandy is a god, with a god’s hearing.

Indeed, hers is better than most, honed and sharpened after years in hiding, anticipating attack at every turn, learning the price to be paid if she failed to mark even the slightest sound.

She supposes she has Pigsy to thank for that as well. Some little piece of it, at least.

There’s a lot she should thank him for, really. The soft spots between the bruises, the way the skin hardens to stone afterwards, the way the blood grows still once it’s finally finished flowing.

Perhaps one day she will. One day, when it’s cool as well as still, she can let him see her blood: bare her veins, invite him to see the power that flows within them, and let him take credit for making them stronger.

One day, perhaps. But certainly not today.

Today her blood is far too hot. And going by the irritation in his voice, so is his.

“Bloody knew it,” he’s grumbling. “Too stubborn to know what’s good for her.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Sandy catches a glimpse of Tripitaka’s face. He looks tired, she thinks, drawn and sad, in a way he didn’t before their confrontation at the stream.

“I don’t think it’s stubbornness,” he says quietly. “She’s clearly traumatised.”

 _By you_ , he doesn’t add, and its absence gnaws deep in Sandy’s gut, like the kind of hunger than can only be filled by nausea.

Predictably, Pigsy is unmoved. “Well, sure,” he grunts. “We all are, aren’t we?”

Sandy’s vision goes black.

She’s shaking again, blind with it. Her fists are balled so tightly she can feel her knuckles cracking, and her mouth is flooded with the sharp metallic tang of blood. It hits her so hard, so forcefully, it almost doesn’t feel like anger at all: it’s just noise, like the shattering of her bones under their boots, the snapping of their necks under hers, the screams and shrieks and sobs of pain, pain, _pain_ —

She thinks for a moment she’s going to be sick. Then, far more terrifying, she’s absolutely certain she’s going to kill him.

Then—

A very different kind of black floods her vision. Rippling fabric, broad and wide, it looks like a river made solid. Halfway blind and almost completely mad, it is a long moment before she recognises it as Monkey’s tunic.

“Hey.” His eyes are black too, twinkling darkness like midnight in the sewers. The familiarity makes it strangely comforting. “Hey!”

“Monkey.” She doesn’t recognise her own voice. Hoarse, strangled, bordering on rabid, she sounds just like the demon they always said she was. “Leave me alone.”

“No.” He’s not smirking this time; she’s never seen him so serious. “Look at me. Okay? Not at them. At me.”

She does. Not by choice, but because there’s little else she can do. He is massive and powerful and fills up her entire field of vision; where else can she look?

He seems even more imposing than usual from this angle, towering over her like a building, which means she must be sitting or lying down; she has no memory of it, but what little remains of her logical mind insists it must be so. If she were standing they’d be eye-to-eye; if they were eye-to-eye, he would be able to reach up and flick her forehead, to annoy her into coming back to herself. He would smirk and she would glare and they’d brawl and bicker, and she would be herself again, safe and sound and normal.

None of those things have happened, though. He’s just looking down at her, all sober and serious, like he’s giving serious thought to pinning her down for her own good.

She would hurt him if he tried.

That’s possibly why he hasn’t.

“You heard him,” she spits, feeling her head spin. “He thinks—”

“He’s an idiot,” Monkey interrupts sharply. “And he doesn’t know anything about anything.” He leans forward just a little, close enough to look her in the eye. “I didn’t hear a damn thing, and neither did you.”

Sandy growls. Hisses. Feels her fists shake harder. She—

Monkey yanks her to her feet, cutting off her thoughts. The vertigo hits light a lightning-bolt, keeping her rooted in place; it happens so fast her body doesn’t even have a chance to react.

“Let me go,” she snarls. “I’m going to—”

“You’re going to help me finish getting our stuff packed up,” he says, tightening his grip. “The sooner we’re finished with that, the sooner we can get moving. All right?”

He gives her shake. Rough but not violent, it’s clearly intended to jolt her back to herself. It works, speaking to a part of her that understands that language, simple and straightforward. There is no kindness in his touch, no compassion, only focus and determination and that little bite of roughness. Sandy stares at the curve of his knuckles and wonders why it doesn’t make her want to flinch or scream or struggle.

“Fine.” She breaks free — he allows it — and stands in front of him, breathing heavily. “I’ll help you with your chores. But only because I want to get moving and get through the barren lands as swiftly as possible.”

He shrugs. “Don’t care why. Just pull your weight.”

Like that’s the only reason he’s telling her to do it.

Like it’s not a necessary distraction, a task to occupy her shaking hands and her shaking mind, like the mundanity of it isn’t the only thing keeping her from—

From—

She nods, swallows, and does as she’s told.

It helps.

Only a little bit, perhaps, but still it does. Enough that her vision grows clearer from the task, enough that she starts to discern colour again, and hear other sounds than the thundercrack of Pigsy’s voice, the high warble of Tripitaka’s, the rust-on-bone shriek of her name, over and over and over, on both of their tongues.

Keeping her hands busy. Keeping her mind busy. Keeping her body—

Keeping her body far, far away. Distancing herself from it, dissociating, dissolving, until there’s nothing left but motion and breath, until it’s moving automatically, without thought or feeling or anything at all.

Until it, and every other part of her, is completely hidden.

*

It’s easy to sustain that hiddenness once they start moving.

Once they cross the border into the barren lands, once the threat of dehydration becomes something tangible and real and present. Once the world shrinks down to the whites and yellows of the desert, once her senses shrink down to the empty void of lifelessness and desolation, once the dread starts to dissipate and the misery drifts in to take its place.

Physical discomfort is a familiar song, its chords drawn out and strung along her nerves. Sandy knows it so well she almost feels lost when it’s not there.

It is the easiest thing in the world to hide that kind of suffering, because it is the easiest thing in the world to feel. She wears it like a second skin, and just like her skin she hides it very easily under her hood and behind her hair.

It is easy, almost comfortable, to find a smile for Tripitaka when he looks her way and tilts his head, asking without words if she’s all right. It is simple, even straightforward, to present the illusion of strength and confidence. It is no effort at all to churn up the earth-turned-sand with her boots and pretend it’s not exhausting.

This is the sort of hiding she’s been doing her whole life.

She fought a demon once — a real demon, one of the sentinels Locke sometimes liked to barter with — while suffering such a dreadful concussion that she was sure there were three of him. The most awful headache she’d ever had, to say nothing of other discomforts that would plague her for days afterwards, yet she fought as if she was whole and healthy and well-rested. She crushed the life out of him without hesitation or remorse, and never allowed even a flicker of weakness to show until she was safely back home in her sewer.

He went to his grave never knowing that he was fighting a dazed, blinded, near-useless opponent.

And he was not the only one. Dozens and dozens over the years, all taken down without ever realising she was bloodied or broken or hanging on by a thread. Demons when she got the chance, humans when they gave her no choice. Perhaps even Pigsy himself, on the few occasions he deigned to dirty his own hands.

He knows a lot about her, so he seems to think. She’d wager there are still a few things he never will.

It will be some time before she starts to really feel the effects of dehydration. Even with her amphibious nature, she is still a god, sturdy and durable and rippling with power. Even if she were without those things, hers is a body forged in survival; she can endure a great deal before she gives in to suffering, even the kind that is within her bones and blood. Hours, if she’s lucky, before it gets bad enough that the others might notice.

She can hide until it gets bad. Easily, comfortably, she can hide.

But that doesn’t mean she won’t still feel it.

The absence of water in this place is a potent, physical thing; it grates and grinds, scraping like rust under her skin, and all the durability and power in the world won’t make it disappear completely.

It’s inside her, the loss, like silt and dust clogging up her veins, toxic and tainting all the places that should be pure and clear. It’s nothing she can explain in words, nothing she could ever expect the others to understand; it’s like standing at the top of a mountain where the air is too thin to breathe, or being plunged — for those who don’t breathe water — into the bottom of the ocean. It is the overwhelming pressure of suffocation, the light-headedness of blood loss, the scrape of salt against burns and blisters and bruises.

It is suffering, a little bit of all the kinds she knows so well, but it comes from a place within not without.

It is silence where there were once a thousand voices, stillness where there should be endless motion, emptiness where she would expect to feel a maelstrom churning under the earth. There is nothing, endless nothing, and every part of her is numb with it.

It is being _less_. It is learning to live without a part of herself that she once took for granted would always be there. Like losing one of her senses or one of her limbs: the rest of her adjusts and adapts, the body still works, but she feels the absence in every breath.

How to explain any of this to the others, she wonders. How to even begin explaining such a loss to the gods and humans who only breathe air, who only hear sounds that exist above the surface, whose hearts and veins fill and empty with only blood?

She doesn’t know if she’d want to, even if she could. Her power is hers alone, in both its blessings and its curses. It took her a great many years to see it for the gift it was — a great many years where she would have gladly gouged out her mind for a moment of silence as pure as this — but she got there, and she learned to relish it.

It is hers.

The good parts, emptying her mind as a river empties itself to the sea. The bad parts, poisons sickening the sewers, the headache-inducing howls of an angry storm. The good, the bad, the everything. Even this, the complete, absolute emptiness. Even the absence of all those things and more besides: all of it.

It is _hers_.

Her power. Her gift. Even silenced and stifled and stalled as it is now, it is hers. And no-one, least of all _him_ , has the right to tell her—

“You’re being stubborn.”

Sandy whirls. Mind blank, body lighting up with years-old reflexes, she is aware of nothing but the silver-black arc of her scythe and the hiss of the air as she swings hard and fast.

She doesn’t even really know what she’s aiming at — his head? his belly? his legs? — or what her intentions are — disarm? disorient? destroy? — only the momentum and the movement, the wind whipping through her clothes and stinging her eyes, the rush of adrenaline, of instinct, of—

And then, shuddering through her and stopping her dead in her tracks, the heavy, resounding _clang_ of impact.

She blinks. Comes back to herself just enough to see what’s happened.

Pigsy’s rake, angled just slightly towards her, stands between them like a white flag, its prongs catching the blade of her scythe and holding it captive. A block, and a very effective one, he seems content to simply hold her there, suspended and immobile, rather than try to counter.

Sandy’s blood, running hot with instinct and adrenaline, resents him for that. No doubt Tripitaka will be glad that no blood was spilled this time but she is not. In fact she’s furious. 

Once again he’s invaded her personal space. Once again he snuck up behind her, assaulted her with his voice, commanded her attention like he thinks she’s just another one of his human friends. Once again, he threw himself into her private spaces without invitation, and once again she was forced to retaliate. Her anger is justified, it is valid, it is—

“Do you ever learn?” she snarls.

He shrugs. “Not if I can help it.”

A flick of his wrist, and her scythe is free; she lets it fall to her side, frustrated by the effort of keeping it upright. Already the weapon feels heavier than it should, her movements sluggish and clumsy; it speaks poorly of her constitution, the arid environment already bearing down on her, sand in her lungs, dust in her eyes, making her weak, making her—

Or perhaps that’s just the company.

“What do you want?” she manages, with considerable effort.

Pigsy chews his tongue for a beat. “Could answer that a few ways,” he muses. “But I won’t.”

And he holds out the waterskin she refused from Tripitaka earlier.

Sandy makes a point of not looking at it. “When I’m thirsty,” she growls, “I’ll ask for water.”

“Will you? Really?”

For an accusation, it comes out surprisingly soft. Like he doesn’t really blame her for being stubborn or self-protective, like maybe there’s a little part of him — a _very_ little part — that understands the role he played in making her this way. Like maybe there is some regret in him, after all, buried under all that faux-brightness.

If there is, she thinks angrily, he can take it elsewhere.

“Not from you,” she tells him. “From the others, yes.”

“Fair enough. So long as you ask someone, yeah?” His voice pitches oddly. On anyone else she’d mark the sound as sincerity; on him she doesn’t know what to make of it. “Look. I don’t care what kind of a problem you have with me—”

“It’s not a problem,” Sandy says automatically.

He ignores that, as he probably should. “—so long as you don’t end up making yourself miserable over it.”

“It’s none of your concern,” she snaps, “if I do or not.”

“I know.” He sighs, big and loud and heavy. Feeling ragged all over, with dust and grit in every part of her, Sandy finds she rather envies his lung capacity. “I’m trying to look out for you, okay? Make amends, step up, all that fancy good-guy stuff. Actually do right by you for once, you know?”

Sandy laughs. Strangled and oddly wet, even in the dry air, it sounds more like—

Like something that’s definitely not a laugh. Something she’s rather more familiar with, and wishes she wasn’t.

“If you wanted to do right by me,” she rasps, swallowing down the lump in her throat, “perhaps you should have considered looking out for me back then.”

 _When I needed it,_ she means. _When you had me trapped and cornered and helpless, when you twisted me into what you wanted, when you made me into a—_

She closes her eyes. Shuts down the thoughts before they can reach the surface.

Her chest is heaving, the dry, dusty air clogging her throat and her lungs, making them burn. It’s bad, it’s dangerous, it’s close enough that she finds she wouldn’t particularly care if she lost control, if she let her scythe take on a mind of its own, swing for his head again, and then again and again and—

 _No_. 

She wills herself to breathe.

Not for him, not even really for herself. For Tripitaka, who she knows must be watching, who yearns so badly to help.

For him, she breathes.

When she opens her eyes again Pigsy is watching her closely. The flicker of regret she saw in him earlier is long gone now; in its place is a more familiar self-pity.

“It wasn’t that simple,” he says in a low voice. “You were there: you should bloody know that.”

Sandy knows a great many things, but that is assuredly not one of them.

“I know that you threw me to the wolves,” she snarls. “I know that you set your humans on me more times than I can count. I know that you made my name synonymous with ‘monster’ so that you might continue sleeping on feather pillows and eating six meals a day.” Her breath is stuttering in her chest; she blames the dry air, though she knows that’s not really why. “That’s what I know.”

His grimace is not the reward it should be. “It’s not... you don’t...”

Sandy cuts him off with a wave; she doesn’t want to hear it, and he hasn’t earned the right to interrupt.

“If it wasn’t simple for you, you have my sympathy—” This she spits like venom, leaving no question of its sincerity. “—but it was certainly simple for me. Survive what you did to me. Survive and survive and survive, so that you could do it all over again the next time your mistress fell out of favour with her people. The simplest thing in the world, survival. I’m dreadfully sorry if your feather pillows were not.”

She’s shaking. Before she’s even finished speaking, she’s shaking. She—

No. Not shaking: she’s _shivering_. Full-body tremors that wrack her from head to toe, weakening and paralysing, like the most terrible sickness. Burning with fever in one moment, frozen with hypothermia in the next, she’s too hot and too cold, too much of everything all at once, and she can’t make it stop, can’t breathe through it, can’t do anything at all.

It hurts.

Physically, it hurts. Speaking, thinking, remembering, everything. It hurts like broken bones, like open wounds gritted with salt, like—

It _hurts_.

She wants to throw herself at him, wants to pour some small part of that pain back into the one who caused it, to make him feel just the tiniest bit in return. 

She could do it, too. Easily. She has her scythe in hand, her knife sheathed at her hip, her arms and legs, fists and feet, her whole body ready and hungry for blood. No longer the starving, drug-addled mess she was all those years ago, she is armed and dangerous and wild. She is _powerful_ , made that way by all those years of pain and anger, well-fed and well-rested now that they’re on the same side, her body alive in a way it never was when they were enemies.

She could destroy him now, probably without even trying. She could—

Her scythe falls to the ground, the thud of impact muted by soft sand.

Her hands—

Shaking, wreathed in blue. Shaking, shaking, _shaking_ , and she feels the surge of power too late to hold it back, too late to stop it, too late to—

The waterskin, still in Pigsy’s hand, explodes.

The force of it knocks them both backwards. Him soaked to the skin, stunned and shocked and hurled to the ground, her reeling and dizzied, staggering backwards, horrified, numb, blind—

The blue glow flickers and sputters, taking all her strength with it. She collapses to her knees, staring numbly down at her hands: still shaking but powerless now, useless like the rest of her.

Pigsy, flat on his back, soaked and covered in wet sand, splutters, “Seven hells, woman!”

Sandy tries to speak. Tries to stand. Tries to move. Tries to do anything at all that might prove her body is still partly her own, that she is still herself, that there is still some small piece of her — her voice, her hands, even her thoughts — that she can control.

But nothing works. No matter her efforts, her body won’t move. She can’t breathe, can’t think. She can’t—

“Sandy!”

And then it doesn’t matter, what she can and can’t do, because Tripitaka is there. Wide-eyed and horrified, he skids onto his knees in front of her, takes her by the arms and shakes her. Not rough like Monkey did earlier, grounding her with the physicality of it; Tripitaka’s touches are as gentle now as they always were before, shot through with compassion, with caring, with kindness. Like he thinks she’ll shatter if he applies too much pressure.

A ridiculous notion, usually. Right now Sandy thinks it’s a very real possibility.

Her ears are ringing, her head pounding so hard she can feel the throb of her pulse in her temples. Her vision is filmed with water, not from the exploded skin but from some place deep inside herself, water gritted with salt and the long-distant memory of sobbing.

Towering above them, Monkey is understandably furious.

“Like we weren’t short enough on supplies already,” he thunders. “You two want to waste anything else, or can we go back to trying not to die out here?”

Still sprawled out on his back, Pigsy manages a weak cough. “Reckon we’re done,” he says in a small, sodden voice. “Thanks for asking.”

Tripitaka ignores them both. He’s still crouching in front of Sandy, leaning in and tilting his head this way and that, trying without success to catch her eye.

“Sandy?”

Sandy doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t even really know what happened.

Her temper is a frayed and fragile thing, prone to unleash itself at the least provocation, but her powers can’t afford to be so volatile. A seething stream or a burst of bubbles is nothing to worry about, natural water responding naturally to heightened emotions; an unfortunate but acceptable side-effect of her current state. But an explosion like this is something else entirely, and she cannot explain or justify it.

Her powers are vast and dangerous, limited only by how much water she has under her hands. She can’t afford to be as free with them as she is with her body.

She’s worked hard on that. Purposefully, effortfully, alone, she worked so, so hard. With no-one to teach her, she had to learn all by herself how to keep her overwhelming gifts in check, how to harness them safely, how to use them without drowning everything in her path, how to hold them inside herself and breathe in harmony with their ebb, their flow, their rhythm, how to—

How to not do _this_.

She looks up at Tripitaka, blinking the salt-sting out of her eyes and trying to focus on his face. She needs the connection, the contact, needs a safe harbour from the maelstrom in her head, she needs—

She doesn’t know.

She doesn’t know anything. Only that she is angry and wounded and upset, that she feels more helpless than she has in years, that she can’t control those feelings any more than she can control her hands or her powers or any other part of her. Only that she can’t stop shaking, can’t move or breathe, can’t stop the terrible thoughts from spilling over, can’t hold them down, can’t keep them in check, can’t stop them from—

She shrinks away, drawing her legs up to her chest and burying her face in her knees.

Tripitaka doesn’t try to follow her. She can feel the rhythm of his breathing like little ripples underneath the sand, can hear it catch on the dry, arid air; he’s already growing parched, she can tell, and she thinks, _we needed that water, we needed it to survive, and now it’s gone, now it’s wasted, lost and gone and all because of me._

“I’m sorry about the water,” she hears herself croak.

Tripitaka makes a strangled sound, frustration dampened by grief. Its hoarse rasp is the only moisture Sandy can sense.

“Forget the water,” he says. “Sandy, what happened?”

Sandy manages, with some effort, to lift her head. Her vision is still distorted by salt and soreness, but she can make out his face a little better now, soft and sad.

She wants to touch him, to stop the trickle of moisture she sees behind his eyes and hears in his voice, the waste of water they can no longer afford. She wants to undo the damage she’s done, repair the shattered waterskin and refill it from her own insides. She wants to draw the power out of herself and pour it into Tripitaka, a human so much more worthy of such a gift than a god-turned-demon. She wants to quiet the rattling in her chest, the splintered-bone pain that won’t go away. She wants—

Over Tripitaka’s shoulder, Monkey bends, hauling Pigsy up onto his feet with one hand. “Come on, then, you useless lug...”

Sandy watches them, the movement and the exertion, and tries to feel connected. She watches the wet sand shift beneath them, responding to the roaring in her head, the burning in her blood, the tremors in her hands where she’s gripping her knees. Even now, with so much precious water wasted at her hands, she is still not fully under control.

Even now, shuddering with the aftershocks, she feels too much. She is a demon, a monster, an animal, and she is a small, scared god, and somehow she is all of those things all at the same time. She feels violent and vulnerable; there is too much water inside her body and not enough in the world around her. She can’t move, she can’t think, she can’t _breathe_ —

Tripitaka, finding his courage, shuffles closer. Places his hands on her hands, stilling the tremors. Finds her eyes with his eyes, catching the water.

Sandy wants so desperately to pull away, but she still can’t move. Her body is limp and useless; it’s his to do with as he likes, and she wishes she could offer more than just her numb, hollowed-out compliance. There is nothing she wouldn’t give to not be a disappointment to him, to not be a burden. She’d give anything, everything to be the guardian he deserves, a paragon of power like Monkey or a bastion of strength like Pigsy, but she is neither of those things. She’s just a god who has spent so long living as a demon she can no longer remember how to be anything else.

She wants to hide. Her face, her feelings, her whole self. She wants to hide what she is and what she isn’t, what she wants to be and what she never was; she wants to hide every part of her, real or otherwise, but Tripitaka is looking straight through the water in her eyes, stirring up the salt and the suffering and the pain she’s hidden for so long and she can’t, she can’t, she—

“Sandy,” Tripitaka says again, and it hurts but it also doesn’t.

Sandy chokes down a lungful of hot, dry air, and feels her whole body start to burn.

“I think,” she admits in a whisper, “it might be a problem.”

Tripitaka blinks the salt from his eyes. Squeezes her hands. Smiles so sadly it doesn’t look like a smile at all.

“Yeah,” he says, soft and slow and sad. “I think it might be.”

*


	4. Chapter 4

*

It never gets easier, being unhidden.

Being exposed and made vulnerable, her weaknesses all stripped bare for anyone to see. Thrown out into the world, forced to cast off the precious shadows that kept her safe and left blinking and helpless in the sun.

Being unhidden means being seen. It means being hated, hunted, hurt.

She learned to fear it. She learned to—

No. ‘Fear’ is the wrong word. She learned to be mistrustful, suspicious, uneasy. Learned to grow wild when the threat of exposure closed in, when the shadows began to pale and the sun slipped out from behind its veil of clouds. Learned the dangers of daylight, the horrors of venturing above ground and stepping out into the world. Learned never to grow careless, never to get close to anything that moved, never to allow anyone to ever, ever, ever touch her.

She thought that might change when she joined the quest.

But here she is once again, living proof that it never will. 

Every now and then she lets herself imagine she might have herself under control. She thinks she can remember how to exist like others do, how to loosen up her shoulders and open up her ribs and breathe steadily and evenly and normally. She thinks there might be hope for her after all, to become more like them. She thinks—

But then she sees Pigsy’s face or hears his voice, or she remembers a particular moment from her old, wretched life — pain or the fear of pain or the threat of it or the promise — and the illusion shatters like glass. Her body takes on a life of its own, shuddering and shivering and useless, and suddenly there is no power in the world strong enough to keep her heart or her spirit hidden.

She tries. She tries so hard, with everything she has in her, but all to no avail: once the shaking starts, there’s no hope of hiding it.

She’s shaking now. She doesn’t know how long she’s been shaking for, only that it’s showing no signs of slowing or stopping.

Kneeling in the sand with Tripitaka’s hands covering hers, she feels like she’s bleeding out time, seconds and minutes crushed by the tremors that won’t let her go. She’s shaking so hard, uncontrollably, and she knows that he must feel it in the little points of contact, the terrifying places where his soft skin tries to soothe her callouses, but still somehow he doesn’t let her go.

She doesn’t know if she wants him to or not.

She doesn’t know—

She doesn’t know anything. She can’t think.

Pigsy is there too, some way away but still so present. He’s smart enough to keep back, to stay with Monkey safely out of reach, but his presence still looms as large as if he were breathing right down her neck. He’s shaking too, his eyes wide and his clothes all dishevelled; he looks like he’s been through something far worse than an exploding waterskin, doused in something far more dangerous than tepid, wasted water. He looks almost as awful as Sandy feels, and if he were anybody else she would surely feel sorry for him.

But he’s not. He is who he is, and she is who she is, and whether or not he deserves her pity she finds she can’t muster anything but anger and bitterness.

Perhaps that’s a problem too.

She’s supposed to show kindness and compassion. She’s supposed to be like the Scholar, like—

Like Tripitaka, who is looking at her now with such pain in his eyes, like hers is part of him as well.

She would give anything to protect him from that.

She tried so hard to hide it from him. Her pain, the places inside herself where it festered and grew, the things they did to her and the things she did to them in turn, the marks under her skin and the blood on her hands. All of it, she tried to hide from him because he is holy and perfect, because her pain is her own, earned or not, and she will not taint him with it too.

She tried so hard. And in one moment of uncontrolled temper — one explosion, too powerful to hold down — it all came crashing down.

She can’t protect him now. She never should have let herself imagine that she could.

She stands. Slowly, unsteadily. It feels like the air has congealed around her, thick and heavy; the dryness scorches and scrapes her lungs, serrated and sharp and sore. Unable to bring moisture into her mouth, unable to breathe through the heaviness, she feels like some old, extinct creature trapped in amber, useless but still not allowed to die. She wonders if this is how Monkey felt, waking up to a new world after five hundred years asleep inside a mountain.

“Sorry,” she says to Pigsy. The word, like the air, feels like it’s trying to choke her. “For the water.”

She makes no effort to approach him, but he still takes a couple of steps back, like he’s frightened of what she might do next. A pointless precaution, in truth; she’s barely strong enough to stand, much less assault him again. Still, given her recent lapses in control, she can hardly blame him for being uneasy.

“Right.” He sounds hoarse, like maybe he’s feeling the lack of water too. “Sure, no worries. It’s like you said: I never bloody learn.” His sigh is a little too heavy, like he’s forcing it out through a too-small space. “Should’ve just kept my distance, right?”

Sandy glances back at Tripitaka. He’s still kneeling in the sand, frowning up at her like a clingy, protective parent, like he wants to intervene before more blood is spilled but also knows he should give them a chance to talk it out themselves.

His expression gives nothing away. No hint of what she should say, no suggestions or advice, nothing Sandy might use to find the right path through this mess. No help in the one moment she actually wants it, and so she sighs and opts for the only thing she’s ever been able to rely on: the truth.

“Yes,” she says, turning back to Pigsy. “You should have kept your distance. Your presence here is...” She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and admits, “It’s a problem.”

Though it’s surely no surprise to anyone by now, it still feels like a cut to say it again, with him almost more than it was with Tripitaka.

With the monk it is a confession, drawing back the veil she’s been hiding under since they escaped Locke’s prison; with him it is stepping out of the shadows that have always kept her safe, removing her cloak and her hood, setting aside her weapons in favour of open hands and honesty: _I’m not going to hide from you any more, even though it hurts, even though I’m scared, even though it goes against every instinct in my body_.

It is nothing like that with Pigsy. With him admitting to anything is a mark of weakness: it is dangerous, it is brutal, it is years upon years of suffering. It is looking into the eye of the person who awakens all those dark, dreadful feelings inside of her and confessing — out loud, in a place she can never take it back — that they still hold power.

She doesn’t want that to happen. She doesn’t want to accept it, doesn’t want to force herself to feel it and know that it’s true. She thought if she could just hide well enough, if she could just keep her feelings concealed and shrouded and safely out of sight, she could hide them from herself as well. That the anger and pain would fade in time, that her body and mind would adjust to his presence, that she would eventually start to see him as a companion, and then as a friend. That she would, above all else, become better.

She hasn’t, though. If anything, she’s become worse. And that doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon.

If she can’t give him the second chance he has worked so hard to deserve, she can at least give him the truth.

Still, it stings more than she expects, the way he flinches and stares at her like she just struck him another blow.

“Ah,” he manages, in the tone of one who doesn’t know what else to say.

Sandy swallows; without moisture, it feels a little like choking. “I’m sorry,” she says again, and doesn’t know why.

“Yeah, uh...” A cough, awkward and uncomfortable, then he swiftly shakes his head. “I mean, no. Don’t do that. This whole bloody mess, you know, it’s not something you can just...” He waves a hand, as though in dismissal. Sandy wishes hers were as steady as his seems to be. “Neither one of us is just going to slip it off like an old coat. We’ve all got our demons to face.”

Sandy’s vision blurs, black tinted with red. The anger surfaces again, hot and blinding, and she tries her best to swallow it down.

“The only demon I have to face,” she grits out, feeling the words turning to ash on her tongue, “is the one you carved out of me.”

He blinks. Like he really doesn’t remember. Like he really doesn’t _know_...

“Now, listen...” He’s speaking slowly, hands raised as though to ward off another assault. Deluded, if he thinks he he could stop her. “It’s all survival, yeah? What you did, what I did. We all do what we have to.”

“Your ‘survival’ was feather pillows and a palace,” Sandy spits. “Mine was broken bones and blood on my hands.”

_And your name on their tongues when they came for me,_ she doesn’t add.

She remembers it, though Their voices raised in anger and cruelty and spite. Human venom, she learned again and again and again, could be so much more toxic than the kind that came from demons. In demons it’s a part of their nature; like a poison plant, they can’t be anything else. In humans the line between poison and medicine gets blurry; they could be either, if tended properly, but so often they choose the wrong one: venomous by choice, and toxic when they discover that they like the taste.

_Make it real,_ they said, brewing their poison to his specifications. _Make it authentic, make the monster bleed for it. Show these idiots they’re lucky to have us protecting them from things like her._

Maybe he does remember after all, at least some part of it, because when she shakes herself free from the memory and forces herself to to face him again, she sees clouds gathering behind his eyes, lit up with lightning.

“Yeah,” he says, very softly. “I know. Seriously, I do. I...”

But there he stops, shaking his head like it hurts him more than it does her.

Perhaps it does. Perhaps his life has made him sensitive and soft to things that she has long since hardened herself against; if so she feels little sympathy. It’s not enough, the stammering and stuttering, the half-sentences and half-apologies. It’s not good enough, it’s not what she needs, what she wants, what she—

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t even really know if it would help to hear the words. A true confession, a true apology, all of it. She doesn’t know if it would do either of them any good.

What she does know is that its absence burns hotter than the desert sun.

She looks down at the damp sand, the wasted water already beginning to evaporate. The air is as parched as she is, and getting drier by the second; once the moisture is gone there’s no getting it back.

Her fault. Her powers, her temper, her loss of control.

She wishes she could say it made her feel better.

She wishes something would. Something, anything, just—

She can’t bear feeling like this. Can’t bear the pains in her chest when she looks at Pigsy or at Tripitaka. Can’t bear the lapses of control, the bursts of anger, the violence always at the edge of her mind, the tips of her fingers. Can’t bear the voices inside her head, the demons and monsters that won’t stop screaming. She feels more helpless now, holding them caged in her mind, than she ever did with her bones under their boots.

She looks at the horizon, so far away and with so little water to sustain them until they reach it. She looks at Pigsy, noting the healed cut on his neck where her knife caught the skin, noting too the way he cringes when she meets his eye. She looks at him as closely as she can bring herself to, and wonders which monster came first: the one he tried to make her or the one she became all on her own, angry and desperate and bestial.

Perhaps the problem isn’t him. Perhaps—

“Right.” This from Monkey. Arms folded, jaw set, he’s glowering pointedly at them both. “Are we going to actually do something about this, or are we going to wait until she’s blown up all of our supplies?”

Tripitaka glides to his feet, tutting. “Monkey...”

“He’s right,” Sandy says, holding her voice steady with a great force of will. “The loss was one we could not afford, and it was my fault. It should be dealt with.”

“So we’ll deal with it.” He looks heartbroken, like a part of him can sense where this is going. “Sit down, talk it through...”

“No.”

It would be a ridiculous suggestion even if they weren’t in the gullet of the barren lands. It would be ridiculous because Sandy doesn’t know the first thing about talking things through, because the very idea is as foreign and paralysing to her as the thought of a full stomach or a good night’s sleep. These things do not exist in the world she knows, not in any form, and she could no more sit down and talk through her feelings than she could eat one of Pigsy’s banquets or lay her head down at night and immediately drift off.

Besides, even if she were more capable of communication, it wouldn’t matter: she can barely look Pigsy in the eye without losing control of herself. As hard as she tries, she cannot reconcile the conviction that he is worthy of redemption — or at least of the chance to try — with the fact that the sight of him makes her blood catch fire. It is absurd, even in theory, to think that they could simply talk through all those years of pain and survival and suffering, all those years of violence and the claw-marks under her skin etching out his name. 

It would be unfathomable enough in the safety of a tavern or huddled around the cozy warmth of a campfire.

Out here...

Out here it is not simply ridiculous, it is dangerous. They can’t afford any kind of liability, least of all one as volatile as this.

As volatile as _her_.

They can’t talk it through. Perhaps not ever, but certainly not here. And the alternative...

Well.

Sandy knew it was inevitable. Understood it long before she found her breaking point.

The solution is clear. Her duty...

To the quest, to the resistance, to the scrolls. To the Scholar’s memory, and to Tripitaka.

Her duty is clear, and she will not shrink from it.

No matter the hopeful, heartbroken look on Tripitaka’s face. No matter the tremors in his voice when he breathes her name, high and feminine and so full of compassion. No matter that it becomes transformed on his tongue, remade into something ethereal. No matter that she sees in his eyes the impossible notion that she might one day be worthy.

All of those things pale next to what needs to be done.

“Tripitaka.” His voice may be tremulous, but she doesn’t allow hers the same luxury. The rest of her may be quaking like a frightened child, but for this she will hold her voice strong and steady; she has to. “I joined the quest to help. Not to cause harm.”

His sigh is musical, delicate. Even now, in his sorrow, he sounds beautiful.

“You _are_ helping,” he tells her, ever so softly. “None of this changes that.”

Monkey snorts. “Actually...”

Sandy ignores him, and she ignores Tripitaka as well. Has to, if she is to get through this.

She turns again to the horizon, shimmering and distant and so full of promise. There is a still great deal of wasteland to cross before she gets there, but she has survived far worse with far less. For once a lifetime of survival has left her well suited to deal with the trials before her; for the first time since leaving the sewers she is not afraid of what lies ahead of her.

At least, she is less afraid than she is of what stands beside her.

“I won’t slow you down any more.” She speaks evenly and carefully, and she does not look back; if she did, she knows her resolve would shatter. “If I’ve helped you to make it this far, that’s enough.”

It’s the truth. As painful as it is to finally find meaning and then immediately lose it again, she now has the warming memory of what it felt like. The crack of impact as she fell to her knees, the sewer-slime seeping in through the holes in her clothes, barely felt. The divine light thrown into her face as she gazed up into his face. The delirium on her tongue as she whispered his holy, hallowed name over and over until she could think of nothing else, _Tripitaka,_ echoing like a prayer and a promise.

She will never forget that feeling, or the littler ones that came after. Defeating the demons and their human monsters, standing in broad daylight, side-by-side with new companions — new _friends_ — and not immediately feeling the need to hide. For the first time in her life she stood above ground and under the sun, and heard the sound of cheers not screams.

Whatever else she loses by walking away now, that will stay with her forever, and it will be enough.

To leave the quest, to leave him, knowing that she has been transformed. Knowing that she felt, even for just a moment, what it was to be a part of something. To be accepted.

It will be enough. It is enough. She will—

“Over my dead body.”

But there he is again: Pigsy, standing right in front of her as if he was there the whole time.

It’s rather impressive, she thinks in spite of herself, how effortlessly he can move when he chooses to. Not that she’s in any mood to congratulate him for it.

“Step aside,” she warns, “unless you want me to knock you down again.”

“I don’t think so.” For once, he’s actually serious. He holds his body is like a fortress, impenetrable and impassable, standing in such a way that Sandy doubts she could knock him down even with her powers. “Come on, now. If you’re going to play it this way, we both know which of us should bow out.”

For a long, heavily-weighted moment, Sandy doesn’t understand.

And then she does, and she can’t keep the catch out of her voice.

“You?”

He shrugs his big shoulders, flashing that maddening grin of his. It’s strained at the edges this time, though, like he’s trying a little bit too hard to be casual and careless. Sandy knows that kind of ‘carelessness’ entirely too well: it’s the kind that cares very deeply indeed.

“Look,” he says, so reasonably it makes her teeth hurt. “If it’s not working, it’s not working. Believe it or not, I get it. But you’re too bloody good to just up and walk away over some stupid squabble. You know?”

Sandy’s hands clench. It takes every ounce of control she has to keep from making them into fists, or using them. “A ‘stupid squabble’?” she manages, toneless with hurt. “Is that really what you think this is?”

He doesn’t answer — of course he doesn’t — and it stings more than she can say when he waves a hand to dismiss the point. So simple for him, so easy: a gesture, and the whole thing disappears like water evaporating on the air.

Sandy wishes she could dismiss her memories so easily. She wishes she could banish all those years of hurt, the scars left under her skin and inside her head, just by waving her hand and shrugging her shoulders. She wishes—

“My point is,” Pigsy presses, almost belligerent in his desire to move on, “you’re a damn sight more useful than some washed-up nobody who picked the wrong side before you were even born.”

Sandy feels something twisting in her throat, rusted and serrated like wrought iron. There’s anger there, yes, because there always is when she looks at him, but something else too, something close to a sob. It strikes her more deeply than she expects, the idea that he, who was so quick to call her _worthless_ , would now place her worth so much higher than his. 

A part of his redemption, she supposes. His growth, his efforts to do the right thing and ‘make good’. To see good things in others, at least, where perhaps there are none in himself.

She might have something to say about that, if she could wrestle her thoughts into order. Might have things to feel about it too, if she had the courage or the strength. Might have—

But she doesn’t get the chance. Perhaps picking up the tension, perhaps simply because he can’t keep it to himself, Monkey interrupts with dramatically rolled eyes.

“Actually,” he points out, “if we’re keeping score, neither one of you are particularly useful.”

Tripitaka, shoots him a warning look. “You’re _both_ useful.”

Sandy flushes, as she always does when Tripitaka speaks kindly of her — even now, even knowing it’s not really true — but Pigsy doesn’t even crack a smile.

“Save the flattery, little monk,” he says, with a strange, brutal sobriety. “Locke didn’t have the right of much, all in all, but she had the right of me well enough. Not good for anything, me, and it’s a waste of bloody time to draw this out by pretending otherwise.”

There’s a gleam in his eye as he says it, like the reflection of the sun in a dewdrop, upside-down and sort of backwards. Conviction of a kind she’s never seen in him before, perhaps a kind he’s never really felt before either. It catches the heat in Sandy’s blood, a chemical reaction that boils away some of the anger and pain and leaves her weakened.

Tripitaka, meanwhile, is utterly distraught. “Pigsy,” he whispers, then turns to Sandy with a pleading look. “Sandy...”

She turns away, unable to endure the devastated look on his face. Her head is spinning, overwhelmed by too much new information, too many shifts in perspective all at once. She wants to spare Tripitaka the pain of separation, but her body has betrayed her again and again and again, and she doesn’t trust herself to keep her instincts in check. She doesn’t trust herself to be around him, Pigsy, and not do him genuine harm. She doesn’t trust herself to be around him and not become the monster she spent years trying to hold back, the demon who lives in the shadows and steals and slaughters and—

“I don’t know,” she says to the horizon. “I only know it hurts.”

And it does, so, so much. All of her, the past and the present.

“I know it does,” Tripitaka whispers, and the husk of his voice says it’s true. “But this isn’t the way.”

Maybe not. But it’s the only one she can see.

*

Her silence is condemnation: she doesn’t ask him to stay.

That’s all it would take. She knows this. The problem is hers, the pain is hers; it is on her to find a solution that doesn’t end in a surgical cut. The violent outbursts, the lapses in control, the moments of madness, all hers. If she just opened her mouth and admitted that: _it’s not you, it’s me_...

It is her place to leave. She knows this too, just as she knows that letting him walk away risks sending him straight back to the life and deeds he left behind. It’s easy to repent as part of a quest as righteous as theirs, but far less so in a world with no-one and no cause to tether him.

She should tell him that. _Stay. Repent. Make good here, among good people, as you claim you want to._

She should give him her blessing to grow, to change, to evolve. Then she should thank Tripitaka for the radiance he brought into her cold, lightless world, thank Monkey for not killing her, turn around and walk away.

She should do all those things. She should, at least, do that last one.

But she doesn’t.

She says nothing, and she does nothing.

So he leaves.

“Where will you go?” Tripitaka asks him, in a low, sad voice. “What will you do?”

He shrugs. No feints at carelessness now, he just looks scared and tired and sad.

“I’ll figure something out,” he says, averting his eyes. “Bartered with enough of the demon sentinels round these parts, shouldn’t be too hard to get one of them to throw me a bone.” His expression flickers almost imperceptibly, thrown into shadow by the hot sun, then he finds a smile and says, far too casually, “No good for anything else, right?”

Tripitaka looks heartbroken all over again. “You’re good for plenty,” he whispers.

Sandy says nothing.

Pigsy’s smile is like water, like the bubbles that broke to the surface of the stream as her feelings overflowed: trembling and ready to burst. He looks more fragile — more human, almost — than she’s ever seen him. Gone is the swaggering, larger-than-life strong-arm, gone is the god who seeks only to further his own status and comfort, and in its place is someone she barely recognises, someone who seems to hate himself even more than she does.

“Kind of you to say,” he says to Tripitaka, and with a final desperate crack the smile dissolves. “But we both know it’s not true.”

He turns away, then, as though frightened by the passion he sees in the little monk’s eyes.

Sandy hardly blames him for that; that passion terrifies her as well, on the few occasions he’s turned it on her.

He doesn’t turn it on her now, though. He doesn’t look at her at all.

He can’t seem to take his eyes off Pigsy’s big, broad back. Watching him like he’s watching the death of a star, eyes trembling with tears — even here, in a desert wasteland without any water, still Tripitaka can birth miracles in his eyes — and choking on his name.

“Pigsy.” It sounds like a prayer. Sandy thinks of the Scholar, trying in vain to teach her compassion, and she feels deeply ashamed. “Pigsy, don’t...”

He has to know there’s no point. Even before Pigsy shakes his head, he has to know. Even before he claims one of their remaining waterskins — the one least full, he insists, smiling like it’s something to be proud of, to finally set aside his gluttony so much too late — and angles his rake towards the horizon, following its prongs like a compass. Even before he exactly does what he said he would and starts to walk, not looking back for fear of giving in if he sees their faces one more time. Even before—

Even before all those little moments make the bigger moment real, still Tripitaka has to know that there’s no turning back now, that it’s inevitable and even he, with all his miraculous, teary-eyed beauty, can’t change it.

But still, even as he knows, he tries.

Because he is Tripitaka, and if there is one thing in the world that defines him, one virtue above all the others, it is that he tries and tries and never gives up on those he believes in.

Even when they don’t deserve it.

*

It’s not the first time Sandy has seen that particular look on Pigsy’s face.

Scared, tired, sad. Yearning with every part of himself for some kind of meaningful connection, but knowing there is nothing there.

It’s not the first time she’s heard those words, either. 

_No good for anything else,_ he said, and she knows that he wasn’t the first one to make that point.

She knows considerably more about him than she should.

It should make it easier, all that knowledge. Should make her better able to understand him, to hear the beating heart behind the big broad bodyguard, see the soul behind his soulless actions. It should make it easier to forgive him, she thinks, to look him in the eye and hear those words — not his own, but those of his mistress — echoing again and again through the years.

She knows what he was to Locke: a body, a tool, an instrument. Little more than Sandy herself was to him, she supposes. Something to keep clean only as long as it’s useful then throw away when it’s not. Kept in his place by coercion if not by force, reminded daily that he had no value beyond what little she gave him.

The feeling of worthlessness, Sandy knows very well. To accept it by choice, she can’t imagine.

But then, she supposes he was very well rewarded for the price of his pride. Feather pillows and fine food, warmth and comfort and a body lying next to him at night. Never hungry, never sick, never exhausted, never lonely. The losses he accepted — his pride, his dignity, his sense of identity — so that the rest would keep coming.

She doesn’t know if it was worth the trade: self-esteem for a hot meal and a bed. To live in luxury but lose himself.

A part of her hopes it was worth it for him.

The rest...

She saw more of his life than she’ll ever tell.

Skulking around the palace as she often did in later years. Hiding in the shadows, searching for things to steal or sabotage, secrets or stories or sometimes just something to eat. It was safer there than one might expect: no-one would imagine a demon or god would be so bold as to venture past its gates, and Sandy was an expert in staying out of sight, invisible or hidden or shrouded in shadows. Sometimes the guards would brush straight past her and never even know.

Sometimes he would too.

It was so tempting, when that happened, to tear him apart. Take his head off with a well-timed slash, strike him dead then disappear, vanished to vapour before anyone even knew she was there.

Even now, she can’t really say what stopped her from doing it.

Certainly it wasn’t her conscience: there was nothing left of it.

She did lash out once.

Spiteful, vindictive, even stupid — she knew better than that: never inflict injuries they could walk away from, never give them a chance to counter, to run, to seek out vengeance — but she couldn’t help herself.

Full up on anger and nothing else, she hadn’t eaten in a week and he had an overstuffed sandwich in each hand. Her gurgling, ravenous stomach might have given her away to one more attentive, but he never noticed anything beyond his own pleasures. The sandwiches held his attention, never mind the people starving right outside the palace walls.

Even the Scholar would have been a little bit tempted to lash out.

Even Tripitaka...

Well. Perhaps not him. Tripitaka has all of his adoptive father’s compassion, his pull towards forgiveness and understanding, but he has a tenderness in him that even the Scholar occasionally lacked. It makes Sandy’s heart ache sometimes, to see that tenderness and warmth reflected on his face.

Like now, for example, as he watches Pigsy’s shadow disappear over the horizon.

Like now, knowing that she is the reason the god is gone and the human is sad, knowing that her weakness has once again cost them a moment of peace and goodness, of belonging, of—

Of being a part of something, together.

And for him, Pigsy: of being good for something. Of being more than what he was.

She remembers that day so vividly, even now. One of the few memories that kept its roots inside her head; so many moments have fallen out or been lost to time and madness, yet somehow, inexplicably, she remembers this. The hunger gnawing at her, driving her rabid. The pains in her belly, far worse than the pains his guards inflicted even on their worst days. And Pigsy, laughing and smirking and always stuffing his face with something, always full, always _satisfied_...

Yes, she lashed out.

Silent and stealthy because she had to be, but she was as keen a shot then as she is now. She can count on one hand the number of times she’s missed a blow, and she paid dearly for each.

Not this time.

Him, full and still eating, satisfied and still seeking satisfaction. 

Her...

It was the first satisfaction she’d felt in months: the _crack_ of impact when her boot caught his ankle and sent him sprawling.

It was worth it, almost, to watch the remains of his sandwiches go to waste, spilled across the carpet like so much blood.

Definitely worth it to watch as his face followed suit.

She jumped back as he hit the ground, blending into the shadows on the walls, making herself invisible and untouchable. Even if he were more perceptive, he wouldn’t be able to find her now; between her natural talents and the need to perfect them to survive, she was unparalleled at keeping herself hidden even in plain sight.

Not that it mattered; even if she’d been a terrible hider Pigsy was not inclined to seek out the source of his stumble. As lazy in this as in every other aspect of his life, why would he assume foul play when a case of characteristic clumsiness could explain the incident away just as easily?

“Bloody carpet,” he grumbled, hauling himself up onto hands and knees.

His exposed back was a fresh temptation. The heel of her boot, the edge of a blade, even her bare hands. She’d never been short on ways to inflict harm, and if anyone deserved such a blow...

She was spared the need to resist by the clack of approaching footsteps.

Pigsy noted them too, and he leaped back up to his feet like he really had been kicked. Sandy remembers the way he twitched and trembled, nervousness stripping away all of his confidence, his arrogance, all the things he was so famous for, leaving nothing behind but a shamefaced, guilt-stricken boy.

She didn’t understand why until Locke turned the corner, took in the mess and demanded, “What’s all this, then?”

Pigsy blanched.

Sandy had never seen him turn pale before. She had never seen him look anxious or uncomfortable or ill, had certainly never seen him look frightened. Yet here he was, quaking like a coward — like she had felt that first day in the alley, a god-made-demon, drugged and thrown to the wolves with only her survival instincts and her bare hands to defend herself — at the sight of his mistress-lover.

Interesting. 

Perhaps a little sad too, if she’d had it in her to feel such a thing.

“Nothing to worry yourself over,” he stammered at Locke, tripping over his tongue in his haste to reassure her. “Just a spot of clumsiness. Must not have been looking where I was going.”

“Mm.” Unimpressed but not noticeably belligerent, still something in her tone made him flinch. Sandy had never seen him do that before either, and it made her insides squirm. “Well, get it cleaned up, then, my sweet, quick as you like. Can’t have you lollygagging about, making the place look untidy.”

“Right, right.” He swallowed, the kind of audible click that spoke of fear. “You got it.”

“Better have,” she retorted, sneering her derision. “It’s a good thing you’re so pretty, my pet. Can’t imagine there’s many who’d put up with your rubbish the way I do.”

Whether or not she noticed the way he sucked in his breath, Sandy would never know. But she certainly did. And she noticed too, the way his expression shifted, nervousness and embarrassment bleeding away into something wholly new; like a blade slicing through silk, softer and sharper and somehow both at the same time. Pain and fear, two things she knew very well, but they seemed to be tempered by some deeper emotion.

Sandy didn’t understand that emotion at all; she’d never seen anything like it. But she certainly understood pain and fear. Those things struck her hard, resonating like a bell in her heart, cracked and off-key, rocking and chiming against the wall of her ribs.

Familiarity, at least a little. And that was very, very new.

“Right,” he was saying again. “Yeah. Lucky to be here.”

“Lucky I’m fond of you,” Locke retorted. Sandy wondered if Pigsy noted the subtlety of her redirection, turning the fortune from his hands to hers. “The heavens know I’m not keeping you around because you’re useful.”

Sandy watched as the tension in his jaw began to soften, as the little fires in his eyes sputtered out and quietly died.

“Yeah.” His voice was lower now, and sort of hollow, the way Sandy’s head got after a particularly brutal run-in with his guards. Though no-one had raised a hand against him, he sounded like he’d taken a horrible beating. “I know.”

“Glad to hear it.” Locke turned on her heel, graceful and fluid, throwing up her hands like she couldn’t bear the sight of him a moment longer. Like he was more offensive to her eye than the mess of his spilled lunch. “Get this place good and clean, you hear me? Can’t have you falling over your feet every five minutes, making a bloody fool of yourself.”

And then she was gone, the fading click of her heels the only evidence she’d ever been there at all.

Well. That and the stiffness of Pigsy’s spine. That and the shadows behind his eyes as he turned away from her retreating form. That and the tremors in his hands as he balled them into fists at his sides.

Not anger. Of that, Sandy was certain.

Anger, she knew very well. It was one of only two emotions that she knew and understood with intimacy; she would recognise it anywhere, in anyone. Her hands shook with it all the time, clenched into fists so tight they hurt, skin stretched taut over her knuckles, nails digging into her palms, thumbs twisted at strange angles until the bones creaked and cracked. Her body shuddered and shivered with it, violence boiling her blood, clouding her mind. She knew anger in every atom of herself, and what she saw in him was definitely not that.

Not fear either. Fear, which she knew nearly as well: the same tremors, the same shudders, shivers, shakes, twisted in a slightly different directions. They were two sides of the same pain, anger and fear; where there was one, the other was seldom very far away.

Neither of them in him. Shuddering, tight fists and shallow breath, it wore a similar face but it had a very different taste. Something else, something just as dark in its own way.

She remembers the way it transformed him, remembers how he — always so massive, a mountain made flesh — suddenly seemed so small, so ragged and wretched and broken.

It is the same thing she sees in him now. Years later, a lifetime for both of them, and yet here it is again, the same wretchedness, the same brokenness, identical in every way.

There in the way he sighs and bows his head and walks away.

There in the slump of his shoulders, the lines under his eyes.

There in the way he holds his hands, his rake hanging loose in one while the other clenches into a useless, impotent fist.

There in the way he doesn’t look back and doesn’t look forward, only down, down, _down_ —

Humiliation. Shame.

Self-loathing.

That’s what it is. What he felt back then, what he feels again now. The horror of being flayed not of flesh or bone but of dignity, of value, of self. The awful, sick feeling of not being good enough, of being—

Of being _worthless_.

They are worlds apart, she and Pigsy; this she has always known. But she remembers thinking for the first time as she watched him shrink and cringe from his demon mistress, as she watched that awful hurt spill across his face, that maybe there were some things that came to them both, unique but not so dissimilar, that maybe some pains were universal, even when they struck at very different parts of the spirit.

She thought, then, that he deserved it. Fitting that the hurt he so carelessly inflicted on others would find its way back to him in a different form, that his comforts and luxuries would come with a different sort of price.

Not a high one. Certainly not the kind of price that would pay for all the blood on his hands. But something, at least, more than the shamelessness of selling his soul.

She thought it was a kind of justice. Meagre and unsatisfying, perhaps, but justice nonetheless. Vindication burst like bitter poison on her tongue, softening the bruises under her clothes, silencing the madness in her head, stilling the blood that still burned from their most recent encounter.

She thought it might feed her for a while, the memory of his pain. Thought it would make a hearty meal for the long days when she had nothing else to fill her belly.

She thought a lot of things back then. None of them flattering, most of them dreadful.

Now...

Now she watches the horizon swallow him, and she has no idea what she should think.

*

“So what now?” Monkey asks, approximately ten seconds later.

Typically tactless, he wastes no time. Not a breath of regret for what’s been lost, not a flicker of nostalgia or sorrow or even disappointment. It’s like he moved on while the rest of them were still talking, like the world is nothing more or less to him than what it is in the present moment; so far as he’s concerned, if there are only three of them now, that’s all there ever were.

Simple, unmessy. Sandy envies him.

She wishes she could forget people so easily.

Wishes she could forget a lot of things.

Wishes she could remember some things, too.

Tripitaka is looking at her. She doesn’t turn to face him, not trusting herself to meet his eye without falling over, but she can feel the knife-edge of his gaze piercing her, like a thousand little wounds that won’t be healed. A different kind of hurt, sort of balming and bloody at the same time; she doesn’t know if there’s a name for them, only that they live inside of her, bleeding freely but never festering.

“Sandy?”

She swallows dust. Keeps her eyes on the horizon, on the empty space where Pigsy’s silhouette disappeared, and wills her voice not to betray her.

“It’s your quest, Tripitaka,” she says. Slowly, evenly. Convincing, she hopes. “I go where you go.”

“Right.” He sighs. She does too; she knows that he was hoping for more, but she has nothing else to give him. “I suppose we should keep moving, then? This place isn’t getting less dangerous, and we’re down by nearly half our water supply.”

Sandy bites her lip. “Sorry.”

“It’s not your...” He stops, seemingly sensing the pointlessness of trying to lie. “It’s not important. Let’s just get moving.”

And so they do.

And that’s the last they say about it.

At least, it should be.

Like Monkey, scrubbing his hands clean of everything that was, refocusing only on what is and what will be, they shouldn’t speak or think of it again. Pigsy is gone, and his hold on her is gone with him; the air should feel lighter, the ground less treacherous. Sandy should feel better now; she should feel safe, should feel like she can creep out of her hiding places, be herself again without fear of contact or questions or _him_.

She should at least feel a loosening of the tension in her chest, shouldn’t she? A lightening of the weight of her scythe in her hand or her knife at her hip. A lessening of the noise in her head, a cooling in her blood, a softening of her muscles and her nerves. Something, anything, to mark the space he’s left for her to breathe.

But she doesn’t.

It’s not that she feels worse, exactly. It’s more like...

More of the same.

The same pains in her chest, the same madness pounding in her head. She closes her eyes against the sun and still sees red and black, runs her tongue across her parched lips and still remembers the taste of blood and the throb of bruises under her skin. She looks down and finds her fists shaking, one around the haft of her scythe and the other spasming at her side, struggling to keep from reaching for her belt, for her knife, safely sheathed now that it’s no longer needed.

She shouldn’t want to hold it. Shouldn’t still feel exposed without it.

Shouldn’t be holding onto her scythe like it’s her last line of defence.

Defence against what?

He’s gone.

He’s gone, banished from the one place that might have given meaning to his sorry life. Denied his chance at redemption because she was too weak to keep herself hidden, because she could not hold down the violence, could not swallow the pain, could not—

Because she could not keep it from becoming a problem.

She got what she wanted: he’s _gone_. Why doesn’t she feel good about it?

Maybe it just takes a while for the body to catch up and realise it’s safe.

How would hers know, she wonders brokenly, what such a thing feels like?

It knows so little, her body. And her mind knows even less.

She sees his face in her head, three times repeated. Once as he was the first time, once as he was that day in the palace, and then at last as he was today.

The first time: sad and compassionate, soft and kind and then so hard.

Sad too, the second time. Humiliated and ashamed and a little scared.

Sad today, as well. As he turned away from his new friends, as he walked away from his new life, as he traded his shot at redemption for penance of a different sort.

All three times, sadness.

All three times, the darkness behind his eyes, the slump of his shoulders, like he was straining against some invisible weight. She remembers his hand on her face the first time, remembers its stillness, its softness, remembers the illusion of comfort and warmth. She remembers the sadness there, the way he swallowed it down, remembers the softness and the kindness starting to fade as well, remembers the way they transformed.

She remembers, too, the way they transformed her. In one moment he called her worthless, in the very next he made her worthy of their hate.

A scapegoat. A makeshift villain for the real villains to hide behind, blood on her teeth to hide the blood staining their hands, the bones under their feet, the lives and souls and spirits buried beneath their palace.

She was always so good at hiding. And she hid their sins so well.

Him too, in his way.

Hiding from his mistress, his lover, his owner. Hiding his clumsiness, too, but not well enough. Hiding so poorly that even a god-demon could see through the holes in him. Hiding like someone who never needed to hide in his life, who certainly never needed to depend on it to survive. Hiding in plain sight with his eyes downcast and his face turned away; his shame burned as bright as a beacon, so much that even Locke could see it, that even a demon could pierce to its heart, find the vulnerable spot and dig in deep.

Sharp as the point of a knife.

Sandy’s, only last night: breaking the skin, drawing out a groan, a plea. And Locke, years ago, finding a deeper vein, making a quicker cut, a keener one. No question, she thinks, which one of them drew the most blood.

Suddenly it’s all she can see.

That sad, sorry part of him, the part that cringed and cowered from the demon he served and maybe loved, the part that trembled even in the warmth and comfort of his home.

The same look on his face as he turned to the horizon.

His words, hers, theirs. Echoing over and over and over again, like the voices in the water, driving her mad and keeping her sane.

_No good for anything else_.

It’s harder to hold on to the other part without him there to keep it burning. The justice, the vindication, the memory of his touch and the horror it wrung out of her body. Hard to remember where the anger and the fear came from when his face isn’t there to taunt her. Hard to remember the violence when it’s tamped down and silenced, when he’s not smirking or snoring or stumbling into her personal space, when he’s not trying to—

Her body twitches, a flinch without a source. Her fingers tighten over the haft of her scythe, fumble for the knife in her belt. She reaches for water, all her senses all at once, and finds none.

Her body remembers. But the rest of her, the part that is aware only of his absence, the part that understands — even just on the most nascent level — that it’s safe now... the part of her that thinks and feels with something deeper than instinct only remembers the other part. The sadness in eyes, the tear-stung glimmer of self-loathing and shame, the pain he tried so hard to keep hidden.

Sandy knows what it is to hide.

Better than anyone, she knows.

She should have seen—

She should have known, should have recognised, should have understood.

She—

“Sandy?”

Tripitaka, falling lightly into step beside her and holding out one of their remaining waterskins.

Despite herself, even despite the fact that it’s him, Sandy is annoyed. They have precious little water as it is, and far less since her explosion and Pigsy’s departure, yet here he is, shoving it in her face barely an hour later, like they can afford to drink so freely.

She shoves it back at him, only fractionally less aggressive than she’d like. “No.”

“Are you sure?” He’s frowning, soft and sort of protective, the way he did at the stream, the way he so often does when he thinks one of his gods is in need. “You don’t look well. I know you didn’t want to hear it from Pigsy, but if the lack of water out here is getting to you—”

“He’s not!” Blurted out too fast, before she can stop herself. There’s no taking it back, she can only hurry on and hope that Tripitaka didn’t notice. “I mean, _it’s_ not.”

He does notice, of course. He’s often the least observant monk she’s ever known — perhaps even the least observant human — but he is just as often keen and shrewd. A simple enough pattern: he has a remarkable talent for only noticing the things she doesn’t want him to.

“He?”

“It,” she says. Firmly, falsely, futilely. “Only ever said ‘it’.”

Tripitaka sighs. “Sandy...”

A few paces ahead, Monkey lets out a pained groan. “Here we go again.”

His derision does little to cool Sandy’s defensiveness, but the look on Tripitaka’s face has a rather better effect.

Sweet and tender, a little bit sad, in that particularly Scholarly way he gets when he’s fairly sure he understands something but still wants to hear it said out loud. He’s trying so hard to connect to her, even knowing that she’s unconnectable, that she is wild and violent and unpredictable, that she has been known to lash out over a a look or a word or a touch—

And he is touching her now.

His fingertips brushing her sleeve, his palm covering her knuckles, his—

Sandy whimpers. “Don’t.”

He looks at her strangely. No doubt he was expecting a growl or a snarl, perhaps even a threat of violence.

She expected that as well. The whimper is...

New.

A little embarrassing, and a little telling too.

Tripitaka, at least, takes it as a good sign. An invitation, even: he ignores her plea and doesn’t let go.

Sandy is breathing raggedly, her lungs burning and razed, like the sun has lodged itself behind her ribs; there is not enough moisture in the air, not enough water to nourish her. She feels as starved and desperate as she did that day in Locke’s palace, the day her anger got the better of her, the day she lashed out, and saw Pigsy cowering for the first time.

He made her cower like that so many times over the years. Threatened her, or sent in his men to do far worse. Threw her out in front of a crowd and let them do what he didn’t have the stomach to do himself. He wanted her harmless-but-not-too-harmless, wanted her to show fear and hatred for the brave men and women who would keep the streets safe from monsters like her. He put that look on her face all the time; it filled her belly to finally see it reflected on his.

It shakes her to remember it now. It shakes her to feel it all over again, that same panic, that same twitching, trembling—

She pulls away from Tripitaka, and she feels her face twist, transforming into what it was back then, fearful and angry and—

“It’s okay,” Tripitaka says.

He means it, she can tell. Really and sincerely, like he means everything he says. She is flinching, she is rearing back, and the look on his face says that he anticipated this too, but still somehow he looks at her like it really is okay.

“No,” Sandy hears herself mumble. “It’s not.”

Her voice sounds very far away; she’s not sure it’s really hers. Tripitaka holds out his hands, open-palmed and inviting, but he doesn’t touch her again. 

“Sandy.”

“It’s _not_.” She’s gasping now, heaving, giving in to the dry air, the threat of dehydration. “He doesn’t deserve this.”

Monkey groans again, louder, and draws to a stop. “Seriously?”

“He deserved to be here,” Sandy says to Tripitaka, not for the first time. “He deserved a chance to redeem himself, to become better. He...” She shakes her head, gives voice to the conflict that’s been gnawing at her. “I should have said something. I should have tried to stop him. I don’t know why I didn’t... I don’t...”

But perhaps a part of her does know. Perhaps she just doesn’t want to admit that she is that weak.

It’s the same reason why she couldn’t keep herself hidden, why the instincts that have kept her alive her whole life weren’t enough to smother her feelings when it mattered. It’s the same reason why she couldn’t control herself when he touched her, why she became violent and angry, drowned by the monster he carved out of her, the wild creature made of survival and starvation, of hate and hurt, blood and bruises, broken bones and broken necks.

She can’t think clearly when she looks at him. Only when she doesn’t; only now, because he’s not here to make her body seize up and her mind see red.

Here, now, with him gone, she sees more clearly what she couldn’t see when he was with them, the parts of him that her survival instincts shrouded and eclipsed, the parts she did not want to see and couldn’t bear to think about.

“It’s complicated,” Tripitaka says, confirming it in his gentle, feminine voice.

“Not so complicated,” Sandy says. “Doing the right thing should be simple.”

His smile makes her chest hurt. “You’ve been through a lot,” he reminds her, and that makes her stomach hurt too. “Some of it at his hands. I think maybe you don’t really understand your own feelings very well, and who can blame you for that? You’ve spent so long trying to hide them — maybe feeling like it’s the only way to survive — I think you don’t really know how to deal with having them exposed.”

Sandy knows all of that, and it doesn’t help at all to hear it said.

“It was a mistake,” she says, clenching her jaw, “to let him go.”

Tripitaka studies her for a long moment, as though assessing whether she’s strong enough to handle what he believes is truth. Sandy bites down on her tongue, willing her body into stillness, into silence.

Finally, apparently seeing enough in her to press on, he says, “I think it was, yeah.”

Even anticipated, it rocks her like a blow. “Oh.”

“But I understand why you couldn’t," he goes on, with his usual unbearable kindness. “Why you might have felt like you couldn’t act at the time.”

_Well_ , Sandy thinks miserably, _at least someone understands_. 

It’s a great deal more than she can say for herself right now.

She braces her legs. Catches her breath, as best she can with air as dry as salt. Looks around at the world that is to be their home for the next few days, inhospitable and arid and lifeless. Takes in the dust and the sand, the razor-wire tug of waterlessness in every direction, the way it already grates like rust all down her throat.

“The barren lands are very dangerous,” she muses, rather unnecessarily. “He... Pigsy, that is, he lived in a palace. His whole life, he’s only ever known warmth and luxury, his every whim satisfied with a snap of his fingers.” Her voice rises as she speaks; she feels herself losing focus, growing angry again, and she presses on before she can become derailed. “He doesn’t know how to survive in a place like this.”

Tripitaka’s smile is breathtaking. It makes Sandy ache and yearn for things she’s never known.

It does not, however, stop her from flinching and rearing back when he tries again to touch her.

He doesn’t comment, but his sigh speaks volumes. He backs up a little, giving her the space her body needs and her heart doesn't want. He understands this too, so it seems. Even with all the things he’ll never truly know, he seems to see through so clearly to so many of the things that make no sense to her; it makes her feel visible and vulnerable, and thus deeply afraid.

“It’s not too late,” he points out, radiant and tender, “to go after him.”

Monkey lets out a desperate, melodramatic wail, and drops his head into his hands. “So much for not slowing us down any more.”

Sandy feels her chest constrict. “He’s right,” she says to Tripitaka. “We’ve wasted time enough on this. Resources too. We can’t...”

She doesn’t finish. Horizon to horizon in all directions, there are no good options.

Tripitaka is quiet again, for even longer this time. Long enough that Monkey starts tapping his feet and muttering blasphemies under his breath.

Finally, very softly, Tripitaka says, “You were never slowing us down.”

Untrue, of course, and they all know it.

Monkey, always the most tactless of them, mutters, “Yeah, she was.”

Tripitaka sighs. “Monkey, please.”

He holds up his hands, waving them as if in defeat. “I’m just saying what we all know is true.” Still, his arrogance wavers just a little when he turns and looks at Sandy. “But, hey, whatever, right?”

Sandy grimaces. “If you say so.”

“I do.” He sobers, then, a strange and uncharacteristic look on his face. “Look. You know what route we’re taking through this place, if you were paying attention last night. You want to go after the big lug and catch up with us later, knock yourself out.” He shrugs, entirely too lithely. “You know, if you feel like easing your guilty conscience or something.”

His cough, sudden and unexpected, sounds strangely wet for the middle of a desert.

Sandy blinks, recognising the words he’ll never admit. “You miss him?”

“Pfft. _No_.” Still, she can’t help noticing that his sneer is a little less arrogant than usual. “It’s just that these supplies are heavy and he made a half-decent pack mule. A real one would serve us just as well, so it’s not like I care one way or another.” A shrug, not nearly as light as he wants them to believe. "But if you’re, like, attached to him or need to work through your ‘problems’ or whatever...”

He rolls his eyes, shrugs one more time, and lets the sneer soften into a smile.

Sandy doesn’t smile back.

She can’t.

But the pain sticks a little less sharply between her ribs, and to someone who wears pain like a second skin that means a lot.

“I should...” She swallows, coughing slightly on the dry air, then looks back to the monk, feeling even more vulnerable than before. “I mean, um... should I?”

Tripitaka’s fingers flex, but he restrains himself from trying to reach for her again.

“Only you can answer that,” he says, very carefully. “But if I were in your place...”

“You would?”

He nods, ducking his head so she won’t see how proudly he smiles. “Yeah, I would.”

Sandy nods too, and prays that her voice won’t crack and give away too much of her.

“I’ll go,” she says.

And so she does.

Before she has the chance to change her mind, before she loses her nerve or her strength, before the arid air bears down too heavily and leaves her breathless. Before her mind remembers why her body is shaking and shuddering and scared, before she can look too deeply into Tripitaka’s eyes and drown in the holy water she sees there. Before—

Before she realises that this, too, is a mistake.

She takes as deep a breath as her parched lungs can muster, drawing on what little water she still has inside of her, and wills the world to dissolve. 

The sensation is comfortable, the familiar safety of wrapping herself up in the blue haze, the shimmering blanket of fog and vapour and—

And _home_.

Home, the kind she only ever knows when she is like this: invisible and untouchable, a shapeless spectre made of mist.

The kind of home she can take with her, even here in the desert, and know that it will protect her because it is a part of her.

Another breath, another moment, and then—

She turns back to her friends, summons a shrug for Monkey and a smile for Tripitaka. Pathetic little gestures, weak and made of water just like the rest of her, but she takes some comfort in knowing they can’t see her anyway.

A moment for them, and one for herself.

Then she turns and runs for the horizon.

*


	5. Chapter 5

*

It takes her the best part of an hour to track him down.

An hour of running hard, of pushing her speed and stamina to their limits, of driving herself forward by sheer stubbornness and determination. She feels the exertion like a thread inside of her, pulled tighter and tighter until it’s ready to snap, until she’s sure she’ll collapse without its support; her body is razed, crying out for water, and her mind is starting to blur at the edges, hazy and nauseous like she’s taken a blow to the head. She’s dizzy and disoriented, stumbling in the dry sand; it’s bad, and she knows it.

Dehydration and over-exertion, definitely. Heat sickness too, probably, here in this place with no clouds, no moisture, and no shelter from the blazing, blinding, blasting sun.

She should know better. Here where she can’t afford to waste her resources or her strength, where she knows there is no chance of replenishing either, she should know better than to push herself too hard. Did she learn nothing from all those years of survival?

Apparently not.

Because here she is, tearing through the desert like a sirocco, a streak of vapour churning up the sand, leaving it wet and messy in her wake. Running like the speed is the only power she has — and out here, she supposes it is — like there’s nothing more to her than acceleration and precision, like those things alone were ever enough to keep her alive.

Stupid, she knows.

And dangerous too. The last thing she needs is to find him at last, only to find herself without the fortitude she needs to face him. No means to defend herself from the monsters inside them both, the ones that rear their heads whenever she sees his face. No strength held in reserve for when when she looks into his eyes and feels those horrible memories flooding back, no way of holding them back or holding them at bay, no way to keep herself safe, nowhere to _hide_ —

She forces herself to slow down.

Too late by then, of course, and she curses herself for it. Her powers have practically extinguished themselves by the time she lets them go, and her body is almost at its breaking point. She’s burned out, exhausted, feeling sick... and, far worse than all that, she’s spotted him.

He’s still some ways away, a spectre ghosting the horizon. She can barely even make him out, distance and her blurring vision making his form hazy and indistinct, but she still knows it’s him; who else could it possibly be, out here in this wretched, middle-of-nowhere wasteland?

Her pulse accelerates. Her pace slows.

It’s another few minutes before she reaches him, dropping almost to a crawl because she doesn’t want him to see the effort it takes to run, the gurgle of her powers as they evaporate, lost to the arid, ruthless environment.

She won’t let him see her vulnerable. Won’t let him see her weakened and winded. He cannot know that she still feels unsafe.

He’s sitting listlessly atop a sand dune when she reaches him, some distance away from a cliff, its sheer face peppered with caves and caverns. It’s an enormous structure, she notes, a perfect shelter against the burning days and freezing nights of the desert, and judging by the flickering motion of bodies between the shadows, it seems pretty well occupied.

Demons, she guesses. No doubt the sentinels Pigsy mentioned having bartered and bargained with.

Sandy has a sinking, sickening suspicion she knows what kind of merchandise he had to offer them.

What he received in return, she doesn’t care to know.

Her stomach churns. Her instincts, always keen and ready, sharpen all the more. Every nerve in her body screams at her that this place is not safe for her kind, that she needs to run, needs to hide, needs to—

She knows they’re right, but she ignores them anyway.

If she is to see this mission through they must be quiet.

Her approach is neither silent nor stealthy, yet still she manages to catch him off-guard. Unsurprising, really; with the life he had, surrounded by gilded walls and gilded guards, what reason would he have for being alert to his surroundings?

That kind of obliviousness could have cost him his life if she’d been anyone else.

Might have done with her, even, if she were fractionally less in control of herself.

He leaps up to his feet as she calls to him, goggle-eyed and slack-jawed and silly.

“What in the seven hells are you doing here?”

Sandy takes in his horrified expression, the way he flounders for his rake, holding it upside-down for a good few seconds before realising his mistake, and quirks a bemused brow.

“Good to see you too,” she says, when he’s righted himself and his weapon.

He ignores the feint at wryness, opting instead to roll his eyes with irritation.

That’s not entirely unexpected — Sandy has never been particularly good at capturing the essence of humour, and he is so particular about it — but there’s something unsettling about the way he keeps looking around himself, nervous and jittery like he’s had too much of Monica’s strongest tea, or perhaps like he’s running on too little sleep.

Sandy is familiar enough with the latter to know it’s unlikely. His nocturnal mumblings last night kept her awake until nearly dawn; clearly he slept very well.

So if not that...

She follows his gaze, notes the nervous twitching, the way he peers over her shoulder as if to check that the path is still clear, the way he glances back at the cliff, to the slinking shadows shifting within, the caves and caverns occupied by—

 _Ah_.

Sandy sighs. She had no expectations, no hopes at all, yet still she finds herself disappointed.

“I see you wasted no time,” she remarks, “before throwing in with demons again.”

Pigsy faces her, then, lit up with something almost like anger.

Not quite — she’s not sure he really has it in him to be truly angry, and certainly not in any way that would touch someone like her — but close enough that her muscles lock up again with old, old reflexes, close enough that she lurches backwards, terrified for a moment not of the god who stands in front of her now but of the one who stood over her so long ago, the one whose kindness twisted into hardness, into anger just like this, not really meant for her but still thrown in her direction, lightning bolts cast at her feet not from his rake but from his eyes, his voice, his soul, tiny explosions not meant to hurt, only to frighten, only to—

She doesn’t whimper, and she doesn’t flinch.

She grips her scythe as tight as she can, so much that her fingers start to cramp, and looks him right in the eye.

 _I will tear you apart,_ she doesn’t say, _before I let you make me another demon’s toy_.

“Didn’t have much choice, did I?” His voice is hard, almost cold. It feeds her memories, awakens her old wild self, but she bites down hard and resists. Let him be hard, let him be cold; she is harder by far, and has much more ice in her veins. “A wasteland like this, there’s not exactly a boatload of available options, you know?”

“You could have turned back,” Sandy points out. “Returned to Palawa. Helped the people there to rebuild from the ashes you helped scatter.”

“Right. Sure.” The hardness falls from his face, as if shaken free by a blow, replaced by a sort of quiet, horrified shame. “After everything I did to those poor bastards, I’m sure they’d welcome me back with open arms.”

A fair point. Sandy thins her lips but doesn’t say so.

“You did liberate them,” she reminds him instead, with rather more kindness than she would have expected from herself. “I’m sure that would count for something.”

His laughter is hollow, as ragged as she feels after an hour’s worth of running. “Never would’ve pegged you for an optimist,” he quips, then swiftly turns away so she won’t see the facade start to crumble. “Seriously. You and I both know no-one with an ounce of self-respect would ever look twice at a two-bit traitor like me. Only the likes of them.”

He waves a hand at the caves, at the crawling shadows, the demons lurking within.

Sandy feels nauseous. Not because she doubts it, but because she knows he’s right.

It takes every bit of strength she has left — and she didn’t have much to begin with — to look at him again and say, with a firmness she doesn’t feel, “Not any more.”

He quirks a brow. His expression flickers: hardness again, but this time it softens before it can find a mark, sorrow and shame and a faint, desperate glimmer of hope.

“You what?”

“I...” She tries to wet her lips, but her tongue is as parched as the rest of her. Her hands are shaking; she has no idea how she hasn’t yet dropped her scythe into the sand. “I came to bring you back. To the quest, I mean. I, um... I came to do that.”

His jaw falls open, disbelief eradicating every other emotion. “Beg pardon?”

“I came to bring you back.” She can’t bear to look at him. She’s trying to look at her boots, safe and strong and far away from his face, but her vision is still not clear and she’s halfway blinded by the nausea churning in her gut; she can’t really see much of anything, and she doesn’t know whether she should be thankful or terrified of that. “Your place is not with demons. Not any more. It’s with Tripitaka and Monkey. It’s with...” She takes no shame in the way her voice cracks. “With us.”

She takes no shame, either, in the way the nausea and horror surges at that, almost enough to drive her down to her knees. Why be ashamed of a visceral reaction, after all, to such a visceral word as ‘us’?

It is a terrifying concept, a terrifying thought, for more reasons than she will ever have the words to explain. A thousand reasons to feel sick from it, two thousand reasons to be horrified: the idea that she herself is part of such a thing, that her life is suddenly entwined with others’, with Tripitaka and Monkey and—

And, yes, _him_.

It is devastating, nightmarish, to imagine her soul as inextricable from theirs, to see her life as so much a part of theirs she can no longer pull free. That she, who has only ever known loneliness and isolation and forced solitude, might now have friends. Companions, at least, who might one day be friends. It is unfathomable, even now, to think that ‘us’ might hold a meaning for her as much as for him.

And that it might hold meaning for them both, together, at the same time and in the same place.

Pigsy, who perhaps needs an ‘us’ more even than Sandy does, he who did the most unspeakable things to keep from being as alone as she has been her whole life. He carries far more loneliness on his shoulders than she does, Sandy knows, and no small measure of fear and pain as well. That he, who is so much to blame for her violence, her wildness, for the terrible things inside her head, might need this too.

That he and she might—

That they are part of it, as irremovable from each other as Tripitaka or Monkey or the Scholar or the scrolls. That they — _us_ — means all those things together, whether they want it to or not.

It makes her shake, makes her shiver and sweat and swallow, makes her feel—

“Hey.”

Pigsy’s voice cuts through the discomfort, making it worse and sort of better at the same time. Worse because it’s _him_ , because he’s speaking to her, because she can feel his closeness, the threat of contact shimmering like static over her skin, like the scotoma that comes before a crippling headache, but better too, because his voice is much easier to stomach than the awful look on his face.

“What?” she manages, clenching her teeth together to stop them from chattering.

“You’re looking kind of queasy.” He holds out the waterskin, careful this time not to touch her. At long last, it seems he has learned; fitting that the lesson should come too late. “Reckon this’ll probably help.”

He’s right on both points: she is indeed feeling dreadfully queasy, and a few swallows from the skin would almost certainly make her feel better. 

But even if she were inclined to accept an offering from him — which she certainly is not — their situation is too precarious to allow the indulgence. She can’t afford to drink freely just to ease a little of her shallow discomfort. That skin, and what meagre water it holds, has to last until they reunite with Tripitaka and Monkey.

She won’t be responsible for wasting more than she already has. She will not—

She slaps his hand away, violent but not nearly as destructive as she could be.

“Why do you insist on coddling me?” she snaps. “When... that is, _if_ I need water, I will ask for it myself.”

He studies her for a beat, reading the truth in her expression, then shrugs and takes a drink for himself. If he hears her warning growl, if he sees her muscles lock up, her body sickening even more at the waste, he’s very good at pretending not to.

“Suit yourself,” he says when he’s done, making a show of wiping his mouth. “But just for the record? It’s not coddling to watch out for your friends.”

Sandy’s heart hurls itself against her ribs, a punch brutal enough to leave her breathless. “We’re not friends.”

“Companions, then.” He shrugs again, undeterred. “My point is, it’s just common sense to watch out for each other out here. Say we end up in trouble with those sentinels out there: you get sick or pass out in the middle of a fight, we’re both going to bleed for it.” She can feel him staring at her, gauging her responses; instinct makes her want to meet his gaze, to intimidate him into dropping his, but she can’t seem to move at all. “You’re not on your own any more, you goofball. What’s good for you is good for all of us. Okay?”

 _No,_ Sandy thinks furiously. _No, it is not okay_.

The thought of it makes her want to bare her knuckles and her teeth, makes her want to lash out all over again, even without a weapon. It flays the skin from her bones, the sense from her senses, just to imagine that he’ll be watching her, that for the supposed ‘good of all’ he’ll be alert to her every breath, awake to her every move, aware of everything she does and doesn’t do.

Every time she falters or fails, every time she stumbles, there he’ll be, seeing it, knowing it, recognising it for the weaknesses it is.

It’s almost enough to make her turn around and leave. Let him rot here in this waterless wasteland with his demon friends. Let him become one of them again, if that’s what he wants. Surely that’s a safer option than letting herself be pulled to pieces by his eyes, his hands, his—

No.

She knows it’s not like that. He’s not mapping out her life, not directing its course to cross paths with those who would hurt her. He’s not picking her apart to reshape her into something worse, not any more. He’s doing exactly what he says, no more no less: he is looking out for her. He is showing that he cares, that he wants to support her not just as a companion, but as a friend.

That hated word.

But there it is in his voice, and she knows that if she could only lift her head she would see it in his eyes as well.

If she falters or fails, if she stumbles or sickens or passes out, if she grows weak out here in this place that wants to wring her dry, he will catch her and set her upright again. Even if it means she’ll lash out or strike him down or plunge her scythe into his chest; he will offer her water even as he knows she’ll reject it and reject him. He will try, and he will work, and he will do whatever it takes to make right the awful things he did, even if she fights against it with everything she has in her.

This is why she came after him, this is why she has to bring him back. Because he is trying, and he deserves the chance to keep trying.

More than she does.

She with her anger and her violence and her wildness, she who cannot control herself, who cannot stop her stupid emotions from devolving and overflowing and becoming a problem.

“You were wrong,” she tells him, as close to regretful as she can manage when he’s standing so close. “If one of us is to leave the quest, it shouldn’t be the one who still has so much to prove. And it certainly shouldn’t be the one who wants to try.” She breathes slowly, carefully, and wills her voice to remain stronger than her dehydrated, power-starved body. “You do want to try, yes?”

His hesitation is telling, and damning. “Uh...”

Sandy sighs.

“Cowardice, then?“ She only wishes this was a surprise. “Running away from the quest that might have redeemed you. Crawling back to your demon friends the instant an opportunity arose. Afraid to change, afraid to grow. Afraid to fight for your place by his side.” She means Tripitaka, of course, and even without voicing his name it still holds power; her voice hitches, and almost breaks. “That’s why you really left, then? Because you were too afraid to stay?”

“No.” The word ignites behind his eyes, cyan-tinted lightning to illuminate the black. “I left because you’re worth more than me. Really, that was the whole of it. I’m washed up, I’m worthless. You’re a bloody powerhouse, you and that water thing of yours.” He coughs, sounding pained. “I meant what I said, and I still do: that little monk needs you a whole lot more than anyone’ll ever need the likes of me.”

Sandy shakes her head, swallows down a rock-sized lump in her throat. “They need a companion... a _friend_ they can depend on.” It stings, but it is the truth and she will not hide from hers as he still tries to hide from his. “Tripitaka needs friends he knows he can trust, friends who can hold themselves together under pressure. He needs friends who won’t put a knife to his throat simply because he tried to touch them.”

The lump rises up into her mouth; in her effort not to choke on it, she finds her eyes brimming with tears.

Pigsy chuckles. “Please,” he huffs, without cruelty. “We both know you’d never lay a hand on that monk.”

Sandy wants very badly to believe that. More than anything, she wants to. But she remembers too vividly the way Tripitaka’s touches made her flinch, the way he reached for her hand at the stream, the way she couldn’t see him for what he was — the human, the monk, the name she spent half her life waiting for — but only the threat of what she’d endured so many times before, of softness made hard, compassion turning to cruelty, to cold and callouses and—

“I don’t know that,” she confesses, feeling its resonance deep in her blood. “I’m not as much under control as I’d like to be.”

Pigsy’s smile is wry. A little tentative, a little wary, but without fear and without dread. He’s not looking at her weapons, or at her fists, only at her face. Sandy doesn’t know why that brings her comfort, but this time it does.

“Already got the memo on that,” he quips, only half-joking. “But you know—”

He stops.

It is sudden enough, and for once without provocation, that Sandy’s nerves take heed. She straightens, feeling the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end, adjusting her grip on the haft of her scythe, catching the scent of danger on the hot air.

She doesn’t realise she’s started backing away from him until she hears her own voice — “What is it?” forced out through tightly clenched teeth — and finds the space suddenly stretching out between them like a canyon.

No reply from him. No matter; she doesn’t really need one. By the time she’s finished asking the question, the answer is right there in front of them, unmissable and unmistakable.

Inside the cliff face, the shadows part to reveal a group of demons, stepping lithely out onto the sand, just far enough not to immediately see them, close enough that they surely soon will.

Sentinels, Sandy notes. Nothing out of the ordinary. Pale skin and pale hair, their sharp pale eyes fixed on the horizon. Even from their present safe distance, even with her vision blurry and disjointed, she can see well enough to recognise her own face in theirs. Pale, pale, pale, tall and lean and powerful from head to toe; if not for the scripture printed on their arms and faces, they’d be a perfect reflection.

Small wonder the people of Palawa hated her as one of them. Small wonder Pigsy was so easily able to make her into his demon-shaped scapegoat.

The thought makes her angry all over again, bubbles bursting in her chest like over-boiled water, the bitterness and pain of all those years in hiding, hated and hating and hunted, all those years of being seen as a monster because of her face, her eyes, her height, while these demons, real demons who look just like her, live in peace out here in the desert, free to buy and sell her brethren like bread at the market, free to barter with the likes of Pigsy and Locke, free to live and breathe and—

 _Free_.

It took Tripitaka for Sandy to understand what that word meant. She’s still not sure she really does. Meanwhile these demons, these monsters who build their lives out of flesh and bone, take their freedom and their power for granted.

Just like he did.

She turns to Pigsy, willing her bleary vision to focus.

“Your new _friends_ ,” she spits, venomous and vicious.

Pigsy winces, but doesn’t try to deny it. “I prefer the term ‘business partners’,” he mumbles, in an ill-advised feint at humour.

“I don’t care what you prefer,” she hisses, jaw clenched. “How many gods did you sell to them? How much did they pay you?”

He sighs. “Sandy...”

“Is this where we would have ended up?” she presses, blind now to the swarming figures, to the potential danger, to everything but this. “Monkey and I. If Tripitaka hadn’t convinced you to change your ways, if you hadn’t broken us out of the prison you threw us into. Would you have brought us out here to suffer at the hands of these ‘business partners’?”

“Maybe,” he admits, with obvious reluctance. “But that’s not—”

“And now? If I hadn’t come to bring you back to the quest? If we’d simply let you leave, would you have thrown in with them again?” He opens his mouth, no doubt to defend himself, but she doesn’t give him the chance. “If we’d continued our journey without you, and crossed paths with these demons tomorrow or the day after, would we have had to cross swords with you again too? Would you have captured us again, and sent us off to the same fate you rescued us from just a few days ago?”

His mouth snaps shut. He has no answer.

No matter; she doesn’t need one. She can see it clearly enough in the way he turns his face away, the way he ducks his head and shuffles his feet, the way he shrinks and cringes, the way he tries without success to make himself small.

It ignites in her blood, a flash-fire like lightning on water, turning everything inside of her to crackling electricity, to heat and power and violence, to—

No.

She won’t lose herself again. She will not—

It will not become a problem. Not this time.

She has to hold her violent urges in check, for both their sakes. She has to hold on to the reason why she came back for him in the first place: the memories that flooded her the moment his face disappeared. She has to hold fast to the memory of that day in Locke’s palace, the humiliation and pain and self-loathing, the awful things that Locke made him believe of himself. She has to hold onto those moments, has to believe that he’s worth more than either one of them sees in him. Has to believe that she was right to come back for him, even with all the evidence to the contrary.

No matter that she finds him here, on the brink of once more consorting with demons. Never mind the other, darker memories, the suffering she endured at his hands, the bruises she still feels under her skin, the broken bones, the blood, the hunger, the anger, the violence, never mind that she—

No.

She won’t give in to those things again.

Tripitaka would tell her to show patience, to show empathy and understanding and kindness. He would tell her to show Pigsy the compassion that he denied her, to heal herself by not allowing her pain to control her.

Tripitaka would understand them both, Sandy’s anger and Pigsy’s regret, and he would insist that they both hold the same weight; he would show her how those two things can coexist, and he would seek out a way to help.

She is not Tripitaka.

She is—

She is very angry.

Whether she wants to be or not, she is angry. She can’t stop it, can’t still the boiling of her blood, can’t quiet the screams in her head. She can’t stop her feelings from breaking to the surface, no more than she could stop the bubbles from bursting in the stream, the water frothing and seething, giving her insides away to Tripitaka. She cannot control those things, no matter how badly she wants to.

But she can redirect them.

“You should tell your friends,” she says to Pigsy, frightening herself with how steady she sounds, “that if they value their lives they will evacuate this place now.”

If she has to feel these things — and it seems that she does — let her feel them for the creatures who deserve it most. While there are real monsters to fight, let her turn her violence and her hatred and her pain on them.

Pigsy is staring at her, nervously wetting his lips.

“Steady on,” he says. “Let’s not get carried a—”

“I will kill them,” Sandy tells him. It’s not a threat, or even a promise; it is a warning, plain and simple, that she needs somewhere to direct her anger. “Or I will kill you. The choice is entirely yours.”

He exhales, a shaky feint at defiance. “You ever consider they might kill you instead?”

“No.”

Given her present mood, it’s not hyperbole. The demons — and perhaps Pigsy too — ought to be very, very grateful there is no water in the immediate vicinity.

Pigsy musters a chuckle. “You know,” he says, slowly, “I think Monkey’s been a bad influence on you. That ‘all action, no brains’ stuff of his isn’t going to work out here.”

Maybe not. But that certainly won’t stop her from trying.

“They’re demons,” she points out, teeth bared. “Demons who have traded in gods. They have our blood on their hands, and you have aided them in that.” She finds the strength to look him in the eye, cold water thrown over sparking light. “Stand by my side and help me destroy them, or stand in my way and I’ll destroy you as one of them.”

What a fitting end that would be, she thinks sadly. To destroy as a demon the god who made one out of her.

It’s not what she wants.

She wonders if Tripitaka would call that a sign of growth.

She wonders if it would bring her any comfort if he did.

Regardless, it is true: she doesn’t want to fight Pigsy, and she certainly doesn’t want to kill him. Sincerely, she wants him to stand with her, to prove himself truly repentant, to prove beyond doubt that he is on the side of right, that he is a god in his heart and not just in his body.

She wants him to grasp the opportunity she’s given: to come back to Tripitaka, to the quest, to come back to the difficult, maybe impossible task of earning forgiveness.

But if he can’t do that...

If he _won’t_ do it...

She will not hesitate.

She—

“We’re outnumbered, you idiot.”

His words, cutting into her mind like a hacksaw. Hissed through his teeth, like he truly believes he can hide his fear if he keeps his voice low. Sandy glares at him, biting down on the urge to call him a coward, to call him weak, worthless, all the things she knows would cut so deep.

“I am aware,” she says instead.

“Are you?” His laughter carries no mirth; it is a high, frightened bark of a sound. “There’s dozens of them inside that cliff. We try anything stupid, and they’ll be having us for supper.”

Sandy snarls. Angry because she knows he’s right. Angrier because she has no choice but to concede it, to extinguish the flames in her blood and breathe until she can see again.

She wants so badly to hurt someone.

“I don’t care,” she says. “I don’t—”

“Yeah, well, I do.” He makes a strangled sort of snorting sound, clearly not surprised by her quickness to masochism. Perhaps he’s seen it before, the indifference of the wretched and damned to their own lives, struggling, surviving souls like hers with nothing left to lose. “Can’t make good if I’m dead, now, can I?”

A fair point.

For him, at least.

For Sandy...

“They have to die,” she says, flat and absolute. “What they’ve done... it won’t stand. Gods are not chattel, Pigsy, to be bought and sold to the fattest coin-purse. If you still can’t see that, even now...”

She trails off, not wanting to condemn him by finishing the thought.

That, she’s sure, Tripitaka would definitely call growth; she can practically hear his voice in her head, so high and so soft and so proud.

It makes her insides squirm, makes her feel unworthy all over again. She doesn’t feel like she’s grown at all; her anger has not faded, her vision is no less tinted with red. She doesn’t feel any safer, and there is no doubt in her mind that if Pigsy came into her personal space now — to say nothing of trying to touch her — she’d snap his neck before she’d even spare him a thought.

These are facts. They aren’t less because she would sooner vent her rage on real demons than gods that wear their skin. It is not growth to look for a more suitable target for the violent feelings she still can’t control. It’s just another part of surviving, as ugly and crude as every other.

Pigsy takes a deep breath, then slowly nods.

“I’m with you,” he says, low but seemingly sincere. “Hand on my heart, okay? I’ve seen some of what those sentinels do with the gods they buy. Believe me, I want them snuffed out just as badly as you do.” And yet he still ducks and dodges and does whatever he can to avoid taking action, under the guise of being practical. “I just don’t want to have to kill myself to see it done, you know?”

He tries to smile, but it falls just as flat as his words. Sandy wants to believe him, to find faith in his words and his smile both, but experience is a deep, jagged scar, and she has paid so often the price of learning her lessons too late.

“Why not?” she demands, before she can stop herself. She’s relieved that Tripitaka isn’t here to hear her say that, to tell her it’s unfair, even cruel to hold someone to such a standard; she knows it is, but her head is full of cotton, the memory of drugs and his voice booming like a thundercloud, and right now she simply doesn’t care. “You made yourself comfortable on the gold these demons paid for our brothers and sisters. A fitting sacrifice, don’t you think, to throw yourself into the abyss to make it right?”

The smile drops off his face. For a moment he looks terribly old, and unbearably tired.

Sandy must be tired as well, more than she thought, because she takes no pleasure in it.

“Not saying there wouldn’t be some kind of poetic justice in it,” he concedes sadly. “I’m just saying I’d sooner not die before my time if I don’t have to. We’re not all crazy sewer-dwellers with death wishes.”

Sandy bites down on her tongue hard enough to draw blood. It hurts terribly, but not as much as his words. 

“Don’t you dare,” she snarls. “Don’t you _dare_ —”

“Right, right. Sorry.” He looks sincere, though that does little to balm the pain or the violence it brought back to the surface. “I’m just saying...”

“I know what you’re saying. I...” She gulps a few deep breaths, holds on to her fraying, useless sanity. “I do understand the instinct to survive.”

“Different for you, though, isn’t it?”

The sincerity shimmers, bleeding out into something more like pity, sour and sickening and grotesque; with her temper already so high, it is no surprise when her vision floods again with images of herself strangling and slaughtering him, a dozen different kinds of murder for daring to look at her like that. Violent, brutal, and unfettered in their horrors, still the unwanted imagery brings her back to herself a little.

Enough, at least, to keep from acting them out with her hands.

“Different how?” she demands, with only the slightest tremor.

Pigsy hums, as though contemplating how best to explain. “Different when ‘survival’ just means staying alive to suffer more. Easy to start thinking about ways to get out of a situation like that. Even...” He doesn’t finish; Sandy’s gurgling stomach thanks him for it. “But when you’ve actually got something worth surviving for... something worth bloody _living_ for...”

“And you had that?” Her mouth is suddenly full of saliva; she wants to spit at him. “With Locke?”

He doesn’t answer. “I want to live long enough to make amends. That good enough?”

Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, Sandy supposes he deserves the chance to prove it. Unhappy but willing to meet him halfway, she concedes the point by not decapitating him.

“We’re not letting them live,” she tells him flatly. “This isn’t up for debate. So unless you have a better idea...”

She trails off, brow furrowing as his eyes light up. It’s a surprisingly foreboding sight, like the first rumble of thunder behind a dark stormcloud, the promise of lightning and life-giving water, of cataclysms that shake the ground and spring forth with lush new life.

“As a matter of fact,” he says, grinning in earnest now, “I think I do.”

*

His ‘better idea’ is perhaps the worst idea Sandy has ever heard in her life.

It is terrible because it leaves a great deal to chance. It is terrible because it depends on the two of them being able to communicate and connect with each other, to work together towards a common goal and not lose sight of themselves or their direction.

It is terrible because it depends on Pigsy being simultaneously deceptive and completely honest, because it depends on Sandy being both powerful and vulnerable, hidden and exposed all at once. It is terrible because it depends on both of them recognising their own weaknesses and the other’s strengths.

It is terrible, most of all, because it depends on her being able to do the one thing in the world she knows she can’t.

“Trust me,” he says, and her blood turns to ice in her veins.

“You’re asking me to be helpless,” she points out. “You’re asking me to put my life in your hands. After every horrible thing you’ve done, you’re asking me to lay myself at your feet again. Willingly. By choice.”

Perhaps he doesn’t see it in the same stark terms. Perhaps, through his eyes, this plan of his is as simple and straightforward as its words. And why shouldn’t he see it that way? He’s not the one sacrificing his safety.

He never would. Far easier to force her to sacrifice hers. 

Again.

Far easier to play the role he’s spent half his life playing, friend to demons, enemy to gods, enemy to _her_ —

He would make her a prisoner again.

That is his plan. He would convince the demon sentinels that he is still their ally, that she is a god — the one truth in all of this — and he has captured her for them. He would hurl her body down at their feet, another sacrifice for their nameless leader, use her as a bargaining chip to gain entrance to their stronghold. He would hold her scythe in his hands, confiscated, and she would have nothing to hold on to but the faith — the _trust_ — that he would return it to her once they’re safely inside.

It is...

Perhaps it is not such a terrible plan. Or it wouldn’t be, if only she could—

“Trust me,” he says. “That’s all I’m asking you to do. For once, trust me.”

As simple as that, yes? Sandy feels ill.

“You’ve made me a prisoner before,” she points out. The truth of it helps to steady her, a much-needed reminder that she is not feeling this way from nowhere, that it comes from experience. “More than once. The things I have suffered on your orders, you can’t even imagine. You can’t...” Her voice breaks; memory surges in her head, a massive tidal wave ready to drown them both. “You wouldn’t even stay long enough to see what your men did to me. What worse things they would have done if I...”

If she wasn’t a god. If he hadn’t known exactly what she was and what she could endure.

He hangs his head. His shame is a bitter, useless thing; to Sandy it means less than nothing.

“I know,” he says, achingly soft. “But it’s not as simple as—”

“Brutality?” She spits the word, shuddering all the way down to her bones. “Violence? Hatred? You made me a demon. You made me a monster. You—”

“I kept you alive!”

It bursts out of him like a scream, as powerful and passionate as any of her recent outbursts. Despite herself, Sandy flinches.

She hasn’t been frightened of him in a long time — it took very little, once she got a little blood on her hands, for the fear to boil away into anger — but she’s certainly feeling that way now. The way he stares at her, his eyes just as wild as hers on her worst days, his voice like a storm, thunder and lightning blasting down, tearing through her nerves, her veins, her _scars_...

Perhaps he speaks the truth. Perhaps he really believes that he was doing her a favour, twisting her body into a demon’s to make a disguise. Easier, at least in his eyes, to be hated as a demon than hunted and slaughtered as a god. He took such great pains to make sure she was kept alive — “A dead scapegoat won’t help anyone, yeah?” — perhaps that really was all he could see: alive or dead, with nothing in between.

Sandy knows better. She lived the in-between.

“What you made of me,” she manages in a hoarse rasp, “was no-one’s definition of ‘alive’.”

He turns away, anguish turning his skin to ash.

“Believe me,” he says, as if those aren’t the most laughable words in the world. “It was a damn sight better than what this lot would’ve had in store for you if I’d let them take you. If I’d named you a god... if I’d handed you over to their tender mercies...” He shakes his head, looking as sick as she feels, then says again, emphatically, “Believe me: that’s worse.”

It is no comfort at all, and least of all right now.

“Say that’s true,” Sandy says slowly. “You’re now asking me to place myself in your hands, so that you can do precisely that.”

The thought makes her want to retch. Looking at his face, he feels rather the same way. “I, uh... that is...”

“That is your plan, yes?” She swallows a few times, without saliva, to try and settle her stomach. “Name me a god, hand me over to their... what was it, ‘tender mercies’? Let them take me, imprison me, and do whatever it is they do to our kind? This you want me to do, armed with nothing but _trust_ that you will switch sides again at the last moment and help me dispose of them instead?”

There is no moisture in the air, and yet she’s soaked in sweat. She can’t breathe, can’t think, can barely speak. It is taking every ounce of her wavering strength not to simply snap his neck and run.

To his credit, he looks at least a little bit abashed. Not much, but enough that she can tell he understands the weight of what he’s asking, and realises the effect it’s having on her instincts already.

“Pretty much,” he says, lifting a shoulder in a weak half-shrug. “I mean, yeah.”

She studies him closely for a few seconds longer than her shaking nerves are comfortable with. Then, no less uncomfortably, she turns to face the demons milling on the horizon and the enormous cliff towering behind them, their home in this wasteland without life. Between them, demons and tower, she takes no shame in admitting she feels intimidated.

Still, she watches them. Not as the prey animal her body still thinks it is, but as the predator she knows she needs to be. Studying, searching, seeking out the weak spots, the cracks in the rock and in their skin. 

They watch her too, just as closely as she’s watching them. Their eyes catch the sunlight, reflecting it back into hers, leaving her dazed. Sunlight is still a strange notion to her, but apparently not to them; how backwards, she thinks, that these demons could live under the sun like the world is theirs while a god like her must seek sanctuary in the shadows, safe only when it’s dark and cold.

The thought makes her temper rise again, washes away the last flickers of dread and discomfort. She wants to channel her powers, take hold of all the world’s water and hurl it down onto their heads; she wants to drown them, to pour it down their throats, to swallow their bodies and their home, swallow this entire desert and lay waste to anything, living or not, that crosses her path. She wants to—

But she can’t. She is not powerless, not by any stretch, but she has no powers. No water, no pressure, no flood. Only her strength and her scythe, the martial skills she’s honed over the years. Formidable, yes, and as terrifying on a good day as a wall of water on a bad one, but against so many of them she knows it won’t be enough.

Pigsy is right about that. She knows he is.

But she doesn’t care. She doesn’t want to hear what he has to say.

If he doesn’t have the courage to get his hands dirty here, she will do the deed all by herself.

She will throw herself against the cliff face, her body as unyielding as the water she misses. She will throw herself against the rock again and again and again, break her bones and free her blood, tear the walls and herself apart until it all comes crashing down on their heads. She will destroy herself, willing and eager, if it means she gets to bring them down with her; she will gladly die for the task, if that’s what it takes to not put herself in his hands again.

She closes her eyes, lets the visions of violence work their way out of her system, slowly and brutally.

“I think,” she says, only slightly reluctantly, “that sacrificing myself is a safer option than trusting you.”

“You don’t mean that.” He sounds horrified. “I mean, you don’t _really_ mean it.”

It takes a great force of effort for Sandy to open her eyes, and a far greater one to find his and meet them without flinching. She doesn’t want to, but it feels important somehow. To prove to herself that she can, perhaps to prove it to him as well. To prove to them both that she is more than the maelstrom in her head.

“I do mean it,” she says, very quietly. “Putting my life in your hands again... becoming your prisoner again... I can’t do it.”

He works his jaw, upset and wrung out. “Pretending,” he manages, like that makes any difference. “It’s just to gain their trust, to convince them to let us...” He trails off. “It’s not real, it’s not true.”

“But it was, once.” She doesn’t look away. She wants to, but she doesn’t. “I’ve been your prisoner before, Pigsy. Really and truly. You’ve held my life in your hands, twisted it and me to suit your purposes. You’ve drugged me and made me helpless, made me hated, hunted, hurt. You made me a demon when Locke needed a worse one than herself. Then you made me a god when she called for the Monkey King and his allies. You kept me alive as a demon for all those years, hunted for sport and status, and then you remade me a god the moment I had more value as a sacrifice.”

His swallow is audible, and sounds very painful. “I know, I know, I...”

Sandy ignores him. “You did all of that, without mercy and without remorse. And now you want me to let you do it again. Put up my hands, lay down my weapons, let you throw me into a pit of demons and trust that you will show mercy this time, that you will show remorse this time, that you will pull me out from between their jaws before they bite down.” Her breath catches; she shakes her head to try and clear her ailing airways. “I can’t do it. I’d sooner be made a sacrifice by my own hands than a prisoner chained to yours.”

It is not hyperbole: memories of that helplessness haunt her daily, hourly. She cannot—

“Look,” he says, a little rougher now. “If I had it my way, there wouldn’t be any sacrifices. Or prisoners, or anything else.” He meets her eye again, and for once his are clear. “If it was up to me, we’d turn around and get the hell out of here, and no-one would have to suffer anything at all.”

Sandy sneers. “You’d let these monsters continue their practices unchallenged. Are you really that much of a coward?”

“Yeah, I am.” His voice has dropped a couple of octaves, though, like he realises there’s nothing to be proud of in that, survival or not. “My point is, you’re the one who wanted to take them down. I just offered a less... self-destructive option.” He turns away, then, expression unreadable. “Didn’t figure the self-destruction bit was part of the bloody appeal.”

The words hit hard. The keenest kind of cut: the one that rings true.

Anger swells in her again, aimed not at him but at herself.

He should never have seen that. She should never have let him see it.

Should never have let him see—

Her vision blurs again, worse in a way she can’t blame on dehydration.

“I...” Hoarse, croaking. She sounds like a frog dying in the desert, its amphibious body all dried out under the sun; she feels a little bit like one too. “It’s not like that.”

“Really?”

He sounds genuine. That almost hurts worse than his forced cheerfulness, the way he looked at her like he barely remembered her at all. It is always so much worse to be seen than not.

“Not as much as it once was,” she admits quietly, and it’s not enough, it’s not a true denial, but it is true. “Not since...”

Not since Tripitaka. Not since he found her and saved her and allowed her to join the quest. Not since he helped her to step out into the sunlight for the first time without fear.

She doesn’t say it.

She won’t taint his name by saying it to Pigsy, won’t taint it by saying it here and now, in this place and about this task. Like the Scholar before him, Tripitaka is above her, beyond her; he’s the real reason she’s still alive after all those years of survival and suffering, the real and only reason she wanted to be. His name, the Scholar’s voice, his promise: _one day, one day, one day..._

There is no place for that sort of sweetness here. Pigsy doesn’t deserve to hear it. He has no right to see her soft places.

Bad enough that he’s seen her hard ones, her serrated sharp edges, her places of pain. She will not let him into her places of peace as well.

Perhaps he understands that, because he doesn’t press her. He just blinks a couple of times and says, “Glad to hear it.”

“I don’t want to die here,” Sandy tells him, shaking under the weight of it. “That’s not my purpose. But I can’t let these monsters live, and I can’t trust you to...”

_I can’t trust you at all._

And she can’t really trust herself either. Can’t trust her temper to stay down if she lets herself be vulnerable, can’t trust her blood to stay cool if put under pressure. She can’t bear the thought of him touching her — can’t bear the thought of anyone touching her, even Tripitaka, because she remembers how it felt to endure it from him — without losing control of herself. She can’t trust herself to keep breathing in those stifling, claustrophobic caverns, can’t trust herself to stay alive when she can’t—

She can’t _hide_.

The one talent that has kept her alive. Beyond water, beyond power and strength and speed, beyond everything.

And if she can’t do that...

If she can’t trust her in ability to hide and stay hidden, how is she supposed to trust the one that forced her into hiding in the first place?

She can’t.

She—

And then, out of nowhere, he blurts out, “They have water.”

The world stops turning.

Sandy gasps for air, suddenly desperate. What little she draws into her lungs is as dry now as it was a moment ago, but she fears she’ll pass out without it.

She can’t reconcile what her senses are telling her with what he is. She can’t—

“What did you say?” she chokes out.

He draws a deep, steadying breath.

“Water,” he says again, slower now. “Vats of it. No natural supply out here... I mean, you know that already. So they get hold of the stuff in bulk and stockpile it in their dungeons.”

Sandy swallows hard. “Enterprising.”

Pigsy presses his lips together. No doubt he’s thinking of saying something about survival, pointing out that even the worst kind of demons do what they must to stay alive, but he wisely schools himself and instead presses on with the issue at hand.

“Point is, they have it. Lots of it: a month’s supply or more. Just sitting there in their dungeons gathering dust.” He looks at her soberly, fixedly. “We get you close enough, and you can drain them all dry. Or...”

He stops, wetting his lips with a quick little flick of his tongue. Not parched, Sandy can tell, but nervous. She can hear the rest of the sentence, the part he’s too frightened to say, the part she needs to hear the most.

“Or turn it on you,” she finishes for him, swallowing again.

He nods, but holds his body still. “If it takes your fancy.”

Hard to know which part stuns her more: his willingness to be struck down if that’s what it takes to make her feel safe, or the fact that she might have a weapon in that place after all.

That there is water out here in this arid wasteland, that it is here in the clutches of demons and monsters, and that he would willingly tell her this, opening himself up to becoming her victim as well. After what happened the last time she had water in her hands — and that only a waterskin — he must surely know how dangerous she is. To arm her with such a large supply and still offer...

She still doesn’t trust him. She’s not sure she ever will. But what he is offering her now is a way to trust herself. A little piece of power, a weapon that his demon friends can’t take away.

A weapon that even he never could.

She looks up at him, trying to read his face, and forces out, “Are you sure?”

He laughs. “You’re the one who can sense the stuff. You tell me.”

A valid point, though Sandy is not particularly inclined to admit that aloud.

It is difficult to focus her gift in a place this inhospitable. It is difficult to concentrate at all, and all the more so when she is exhausted, dehydrated, and emotionally compromised. Easy enough to blame that for her inability to pick up on what he claims is true, but she can tell it’s more than simple sense blindness on her part: the harder she tries to pierce the cliff and the caverns within, the more she finds herself blocked.

Magic, she’s sure of it. Some insidious demonic power at work, reinforcing the rock and making it hard to penetrate whether by mind or by body. Fortifications, she suspects, against the gods brought there to die.

Sandy recalls Locke’s prison, the one she knows Pigsy had a hand in building. Strengthened and fortified, imbued with all sorts of tricks and spells to keep the gods where they were thrown; she wonders if the same thing is at play here.

She wonders too, refusing to look back at him, if he knew about it. If he...

No matter. She banishes the thought before it can take hold, then focuses her mind and redoubles her efforts.

The effort exhausts her; more, it frustrates her. Still, she presses on, piercing the veil of power as best she can, reaching through the dust and sand and stone, the stench of demons and her own fear, reaching and reaching and finding—

Yes.

 _Water_.

After all this time without, unable to detect so much as a drop of moisture beyond their stagnating waterskins, the relief is almost overwhelming.

Her senses all ignite at once, flooded with the phantom taste, parched and starved, depleted and dehydrated and desperate; she’d assumed days of this, anticipated, expected, prepared. A nd now, only a few hundred paces ahead of her: water. 

Just as he said, _water_.

She yearns, suddenly and overwhelmingly, to throw herself into that place, demons or no demons, and drink and drink and drink until she drowns. She wants to fill her dehydrated body with the water it needs to survive, make herself strong, make herself powerful, make herself unstoppable.

She resists only because she can feel Pigsy staring at her, because she can sense his triumph so potently it overrides even the unspeakable relief of fresh water.

“Hmph,” she says, as haughty as she can muster. “Perhaps they do have a little water, after all.”

Pigsy doesn’t smirk, but his grin is close enough that it makes her grip her scythe a little tighter.

“You see?” He clears his throat, noticing her response, and wipes his features clear. “Even without your weapons, even with your life in my hands or whatever else has you worried... you’re not going to be helpless. Even if I did turn on you. Which I won’t, by the way, but I get...” He coughs again, not yet ready to hold that much responsibility. “Anyway. The point is, that water in there is the most precious commodity in this whole bloody desert. And it’s all at your fingertips.”

Sandy looks down at her hand, the one not holding the scythe. It’s steadier than it has been in days. “Mm.”

“You could take them all out,” Pigsy presses. “Every one of them, and me too if you’ve a mind to. All I’m asking you to do is trust me to get you in close enough to use it.”

Sandy still doesn’t like that part. Still feels queasy just to think about it. The water has changed things a lot, even she won’t deny, but having her powers never stopped her from feeling helpless at his hands before.

“I’m not afraid of you.” She says it very slowly, trying to sift through her awful, messy feelings. “It’s not that. But the thought of having to be at your mercy again... of letting you _touch_ me...”

She can’t finish. Her body is shuddering again, like it never stopped; its responses anger her and frighten her, make her feel helpless in a way that even he doesn’t. She can’t control it, can’t control herself, and her vision is swimming with—

She swipes furiously at her eyes, casting away the evidence. Even if she could afford to waste the moisture of tears in a place like this, she wouldn’t let him see it.

Not that it matters: he’s not even looking at her any more. He’s watching the silhouettes of his demon friends on the horizon, chewing his lip and pretending to be lost in thought; the illusion might have been convincing to someone less attuned to behaviour, but Sandy has spent her life gauging and measuring every detail of the people she meets, locked in on every breath, every twitch, every flicker. On a good day, it’s the difference between fight and flight; on a bad day, the difference between blood or bones or breath.

Pigsy, more than almost anyone else, she knows as well as herself. He may not be looking at her, but she can tell he’s watching her every move.

“I get it,” he says, staring at his demon cohorts. “I know you don’t believe me when I say that, but it’s true.”

Sandy shakes her head. “You can’t even begin to understand.”

He opens his mouth as if to counter, then closes it with a sigh.

“As you say.” Letting it lie there, he turns again and gestures at the horizon, at the demon figures standing there, still watching them. “Either way, time to make the call: are we doing this or not?”

Sandy studies him, as closely as she dares. Easier, if only a little, with him turning his focus elsewhere. She can still feel his scrutiny, his rapt attention, but it’s easier to swallow without having to look into his eyes and see her shaking reflection.

She can’t begin to imagine how pale she must be right now. Can’t begin to imagine how much she must look like a demon, how much she must look like one of _them_. She wonders if she could fool them as easily as she can fool gods and humans.

Would she be willing to stake her life on it?

Would she be willing to stake Pigsy’s life too?

She has dreamed so often of putting her scythe or her knife to his throat, of crushing his ribs with her knees, his face with her fists, his body with her boots. She has dreamed so often of ending him, destroying him, making him suffer even for just a moment with some small piece of what he put her through for years. Vivid, visceral, violent, those visions kept her going during the very worst; they kept her as close to sane as she ever got, brought her back from the brink over and over again. It felt like a triumph, on the really horrible days, to fantasise about his death instead of her own.

And yet here she stands, by his side, companions if not quite friends, and she thinks that perhaps she doesn’t want him to risk his life for this after all.

She wants to believe that’s Tripitaka’s doing, that she’s only trying to be the good soul she wants him to see.

She’s not sure if it would be true.

She’s not really sure of anything.

She swallows hard, gripping her scythe with all the strength she has.

“Say I do trust you,” she says, in a low voice. “Would you trust me?”

He blinks, visibly thrown. “Eh?”

Sandy turns away from him with her whole body, eyes closed to be doubly sure she won’t look back.

“You keep asking me to trust you,” she says. “To put myself in your hands, make myself helpless again. To become your prisoner, your bargaining chip, your...” She swallows, unable to finish. “But I’m the one who almost broke your arm last night, who almost slit your throat, and who made a waterskin explode in your face. Do you really trust me not to do all of those things again if I’m cornered? Do you really trust me not to—”

 _Panic_ , she can’t say.

Pigsy, rather more generous, suggests, “Give in to your survival instincts?”

Sandy grimaces.

“I was going to say ‘beat you to within an inch of your life’,” she admits. “But yes, that.”

He ponders the question for just a moment, like it’s not worth any more thought than that.

“I trust you to keep your mind on the task,” he says. “If that’s what you mean. Whatever other problems or issues you have, you’re really good at the whole ‘bloody-minded focus’ thing.” He smiles, only a little wry. “Like, _seriously_ good. It’s actually kind of scary.”

Sandy can’t quite muster a smile in return. “More scary than my blade at your throat?”

He shrugs, then softens, looking at her with a peculiar sort of fondness. Like he really doesn’t grasp just how deep her instincts go, how dangerous they might be for him.

“Maybe not _that_ scary,” he concedes after a beat. “Guess we’ll both be testing the waters of trust, won’t be?”

The honesty strikes her harder than she expects. It crackles in his eyes like electricity, like the little lightning-bolts that hum on the prongs of his rake. There is a sort of invitation in it, careful but earnest, a willingness to open himself up to pain at her hands if only she’ll allow a little bit of the same in return.

She doesn’t know if she’s capable of that yet. She doesn’t know if she ever will be, or even if she should be. He’s done so much, caused so much harm, so much suffering. She doesn’t know if forgiveness and trust are things she even wants to aspire to. Self-protection tells her ‘no’, but...

But in her mind’s eye she sees Tripitaka, his warm eyes and his open arms, the way he reached for her at the stream. And it hurts because she is not afraid of him, because she could never be afraid of him, but she still flinched when he tried to touch her, still reared back when his fingertips brushed her knuckles, her, face, her—

He deserves better from his friends.

Whether Pigsy deserves better as well, she cannot say. But she can—

She _will_ try.

She takes a last deep breath, looks Pigsy in the eye, and does not flinch.

“All right,” she says, brandishing her scythe like the lifeline it is. “Let’s go.”

*


	6. Chapter 6

*

She has to relinquish her weapons, of course.

“For authenticity,” Pigsy insists, and the word makes Sandy’s stomach go sour, forces her to swallow down the taste of bile and stone, the mnemonic _crunch_ as her face hit the floor, softened only a little by the smoke still in her lungs.

His voice circles like a shark in her head, from way back then. _“Make a show of it,”_ he said to his humans, then laughed when she threatened to kill him. _“That’s the kind of authenticity I’m talking about!”_

Authenticity. Sandy knows the true meaning of the word lies in truth and honesty, but in her mind it only means deceit and deception and treachery. Authenticity: it means boots between her ribs and blood under her tongue, it means ‘demon’ when it should mean ‘god’, ‘enemy’ when it should mean ‘friend’. It means—

It means the worst of what his human guards did to her, sneering and laughing and insisting it was to keep things ‘authentic’. Demons, all of them, just without the longer lifespan.

“Authenticity,” he said then, with his mouth pulled into a sad straight line. And now, years later, he says it again, “Authenticity,” and smiles at her like he thinks that makes it easier.

It doesn’t. She doubts anything could.

Her scythe is in his hand. Her knife is at his hip, sheathed and out of her reach. Her palms are empty and sweating.

She doesn’t know if she can do this.

Pigsy herds her along with his rake, poking and prodding at her like cattle. Like the chattel she claimed she wasn’t, the meat and bread their kind were to him. There’s some meagre comfort in the way he’s not actually touching her with his hands — no doubt he thinks the humiliation is a kindness, and perhaps he’s not completely wrong — but she still feels trapped and cornered, a wild animal forced into tameness, muzzled and leashed and bound to his will. Her anger is out of reach now, locked away in the places she can’t touch, and all that remains is the desperate, barely-suppressed urge to run, to _hide_.

“Just for show, yeah?” he reminds her, and gives her another pointed shove.

She stumbles but doesn’t fall. Disoriented, off-balance; easy to assume it’s his strength driving her down, but she knows she’s far more a victim to her body and her mind right now than to the impotent prongs of his weapon. The dehydration is like a drumbeat behind her eyes, the exhaustion like rolling thunder in her bones, and the fear crawls under her skin like a living, skittering thing.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she says.

He laughs, like he thinks she’s joking, then cheerfully suggests, “Save it for when we get closer, eh? That’ll _really_ make it look authentic.”

Sandy doesn’t turn her head. Instead she glares at the ground.

“More so,” she mutters, clenching her teeth, “if I aim for you.”

He stops laughing. She takes some meagre satisfaction from that. “On second thought, uh, maybe best not.”

And he shoves her again, this time notably more gentle.

The demons halt their approach. One of them steps forward with a raised hand — open palm, his weapon safely sheathed at his side; Sandy doesn’t know why that makes her feel worse — and takes a moment to look them up both and down. Clinical and detached, he spends barely a moment on Pigsy and rather longer on Sandy, running his keen gaze over her body like it’s fabric for making curtains.

Sandy keeps her head bowed, watches this new threat through the veil of her hair, swallowing down the urge to respond with the usual violence. Her instincts feel inflamed, like she’s somehow allergic to his appraisal; she wants to throw herself at him and then perhaps at Pigsy as well, she wants to do what she’s always done in situations like this, what she always needed to do if she wanted to stay alive.

She doesn’t.

She won’t blow their cover. Not yet.

She can—

She _will_ do this.

She studies the ground, studies her boots, and waits for the demon to stop studying her.

Pigsy, meanwhile, is holding up his rake in cheerful greeting.

“God delivery,” he announces, with a breeziness that belies the audible thundering of his heart. This close, Sandy can hear it very easily, a thrum of nervousness that seems to ripple through the sand. “Your boss around?”

The demon makes a disdainful clicking noise in his throat. He’s clearly the leader here, though Sandy can’t tell what singles him out as such; there are three of them, and so far as she can tell they’re almost identical.

“Just one?” It’s deliberate, she can tell, how he ignores the question. There’s a power play at work, too subtle for her to fully grasp. Pigsy certainly understands it, though; he’s even more on edge than he was before. “You’re losing your touch, Pig Man.”

Pigsy makes a low, strangled sound, like his body can’t figure out whether it wants to to bristle or flinch.

Sandy knows that feeling very well, the dull clash of anger, fear, and pain. On her it manifests as hiding, as violence, as night terrors and hallucinations and invasive thoughts, the daily horrors that comes from a lifetime of being trapped and hurt. On him it’s what she saw that day in Locke’s palace, what she saw again as he turned away from the quest and his new friends: humiliation, degradation, self-loathing, the kind of shame that won’t ever wash clean even with all the repentance in the world.

He makes only a passing attempt at defiance this time, muttering a half-hearted, “What have I told you lot about...” before trailing off with a sigh.

Apparently this is a conversation they’ve had more than once; craning her neck, glancing back at him, Sandy can see the lines of weariness and misery, far deeper now than they were before they started. If he were anyone else, she might feel for him.

Maybe feels for him a little anyway, in spite of herself.

The demon leader, unimpressed, merely taps his foot. “Well, then?”

Pigsy sighs again, heavier this time and rather sadder.

“Straggler,” he says, by way of explanation. “You want her or not?”

The demon takes a long step forward, clearly intended to intimidate. There’s a sword sheathed at his hip, which he draws as he moves, holding it out in front of him like a warning or a threat. Sandy has only a fraction of a moment to wonder how sensitive his nerves are, how easily or quickly she could disarm him if she needed to, and then the flat of the blade is pressed against her jaw, tilting her head up and angling her face so that he can peer into her eyes.

Sandy recognises this kind of contact too, the kind without touch. The way he moves, the way he keeps himself a pace or two back, the way he uses the sword as a barrier, letting the blade touch her so that he doesn’t have to dirty his hands...

His disgust is not unfamiliar. Sadly, neither is the self-loathing it reawakens: a lifetime of watching humans cringe away from her, wrinkling their noses and muttering their horror, has left her acutely aware of her not-so-appealing qualities.

Which is to say, of course, all of her.

It means less from a demon, yes. But it still stings, and it brings a shame to her face that skirts a little too close to what she sees on Pigsy’s: shame, humiliation, and a life carved out of worthlessness and detestation.

“A straggler indeed,” the demon hums at last. “I can’t imagine this one will be of much use to anyone, but a puny god is still a god, mm?” He lowers the blade, and Sandy dutifully lets her head drop back down; a relief, in truth, to be able to hide her expression, the amusement and anger that comes with being so often underestimated. “Come along, then. Bring it.”

He turns away, then, not bothering to hide his sneer. Another flicker of disgust as he sheathes his sword and wipes his hands on his tunic, as though afraid he’s been contaminated even without contact. That done, he slinks back towards his companions, not sparing so much as a glance for the traitor god and his merchandise, as if they’re worth no more than the time he’s already wasted on them.

Sandy will thoroughly enjoy drowning him.

Behind her, Pigsy coughs, dry and dust-clogged. She can feel the tension in him, not in his body but in the prongs of his rake when he nudges her again. It’s weak and somewhat futile, like he’s skirting a little too close to his old self, to those awful things that Locke used to say and the part of himself that still, even now, believes that they are true.

_Useless. Worthless. Good for nothing._

He will lose himself to that feeling. Sandy knows this from experience. If she doesn’t draw him back out, he will drown in his own self-loathing long before she ever gets her hands on enough water to drown a demon. And if he is lost, she will be as well, devoured by the need to survive, to escape the things he once did to her.

She turns her head, grits out, “Focus!”

Pigsy blinks, shakes himself a little and drags his free hand down his face, as if coming out of a deep, dream-touched sleep.

“Right, right.” He coughs again, sounding only fractionally more like himself, and says, “Best not keep them waiting, eh?”

And he shoves her again.

A proper shove this time, with real force and real power.

Hard to tell if he’s simply playing the part or venting some of his humiliation, but either way it’s rough enough to hurt a little. Unbalances her too, enough that she almost goes sprawling. If he really is just playing for authenticity’s sake, he’s doing it rather too well for her liking. She didn’t count on having to watch out for his feelings as well as her own.

Perhaps that’s her failing; perhaps she should have anticipated this. She knows better than most, after all, how difficult it can be to face the thing she once was.

She doesn’t speak of it, though. Even if she were able to speak at all without arousing suspicion, she doubts she could think of anything helpful to say to him.

It says enough of her trust that she doesn’t demand they end this now. That she keeps moving, that she lets him prod and poke at her with his rake, herding her along like the wild creature they always said she was, that she doesn’t complain when he shoves her too hard or mutters too harshly. It is enough that she’s still going along with this at all, that she hasn’t simply turned around and ripped out his throat, as a part of her still so desperately wants to.

Not yet, no. He claims to trust her. And even if she can’t trust him completely, she can at least give him the benefit of the doubt for as long as he’s not trying anything.

She owes him—

No. She owes herself that much. To try. To see if she can—

If _they_ can work together, as Tripitaka said they must.

She swallows her doubts, finds her footing, and keeps going.

*

It’s a little bit cooler inside the cliff.

It’s also oppressive and unsettling.

The demons’ homestead is a dizzying complex of tight tunnels and cavernous chambers carved out of the rock. The rock itself seems to hum and vibrate, the dull thrum of magic pulsing through the walls, the ceiling, even the ground beneath their feet. It itches under Sandy’s skin and inside her head, reminding her of Locke’s prison, reinforced and all but impenetrable, built by a god’s hands to keep his own brethren subdued.

She wonders if Pigsy had a hand in building this one as well.

The whole structure is a weapon, she thinks nervously, imbued with enough power to crush its immortal prisoners to death, should the need ever arise.

Sandy does not want to know if it ever has.

If she’s standing on the bones of her fellow gods...

If Pigsy really did help to build such a place...

She’s not sure which thought is more devastating.

It’s not the only weapon these demons have at their disposal. The tunnels twist and turn with no discernible pattern, a chaotic labyrinth seemingly designed that way to ensure its occupants remain disoriented and docile. Trying to find some kind of sense in its winding and wending, Sandy feels herself growing light-headed; she doubts she could find her way out if pressed, and certainly not if pursued. No matter how this ruse plays out, it seems she really is trapped in here.

Trapped, cornered, vulnerable.

Entirely at their—

Entirely at _his_ mercy.

She stumbles.

It’s not Pigsy’s fault this time, but he reaches out to steady her anyway, almost by instinct. “Easy, now.”

Hard to say who reacts more viscerally to that: Sandy, rearing back with a wild-animal whine, or their demon escort, spinning on his heels to stare at him with a disgust so profound it seems almost to verge on nausea.

“You’re getting soft, Pig Man,” he remarks icily.

Pigsy clears his throat. “No sense spoiling the merchandise,” he covers, rather weakly.

“As I said: soft.” He muses on this for a moment, then adds, “Though I suppose it was inevitable, given the natural weaknesses of your kind... and, of course, your personal failings.” His sneer certainly implies more of the latter; Pigsy doesn’t even try to mask his flinch. “Why Princess Locke debases herself with you, I will never fathom.”

Pigsy makes a pained sound, awful enough that even the demon must know the blow has found its mark. 

“Not your place to fathom anything, mate,” he forces out, with an obvious effort. “You’re just a lackey.”

“Mm.” The demon picks up his pace a little, dismissing the point with a wave of his hand, as if it was little more than a minor irritation. “I suppose that makes two of us, yes? Albeit only one with delusions of being something more.”

Pigsy’s growl, low and threatening thunder, could rival one of Sandy’s best.

For her part, she tries to ignore him. Ignores both of them, god and demon.

They with their senseless, silly posturing, their playing at power games, like such things mean anything in the real world. It sets her teeth on edge, makes her anxious and angry. What’s the point, she wonders, in holding one’s status above another’s head? Do they really think such a thing holds any value? As if it could fill an empty belly or slake a week’s worth of thirst, stave off poison or infection, save a life...

Substanceless and purposeless, their little games. Pigsy, hiding his defection like it’s not obvious to anyone who can see him that he’s no longer Locke’s obedient little lap-dog. He’s supposed to have changed, grown, become a true, honest god, but Sandy can tell that the demon’s words cut deep. Even now, serving the side of good as he should, still it seems he cares what his demon friends think of him.

This is what matters to him, and to them. This is their definition of torment, of misery, of inflicting pain: to take cheap shots at each other, accuse them of being unneeded.

There is not a soul in this place that understands the first thing about true suffering, about misery or torment; they would die in a day if they lived the life they forced on her.

They would—

No.

She’s not listening to them. She’s not paying them any heed. She is ignoring them, all of them, because there is nothing any one of them has to say that is worth her attention.

She breathes.

She focuses, as best she can, on the stagnant murmurs of nearby water.

She is not defenceless.

Trapped, perhaps. Worse, trapped with _him_. But she is not defenceless.

He was right about that, at least.

She can sense it more vividly now they’re inside, its patience and stillness a counterpoint to the blood rushing in her own veins. Vats of it, just as he said, nestled deep in the bowels of this place. Hidden from would-be intruders, or perhaps simply kept out of reach of their god ‘visitors’. Either way, she can tell there isn’t much chance of simply walking up and stealing it from beneath their noses.

Fortunately, she doesn’t have to.

Sandy’s powers have never depended on touch, or on being more than reasonably near to the water she uses. It is enough that she can feel it clearly now, that its presence is inside of her, beating in her chest, pulsing in her head, filling her mind, her mouth, her everything.

It will be hers. They can’t keep it from her now that she can feel it, and they won’t be able to stop her from using it to drown them all.

These demons, these monsters who look like her, these soulless creatures who trade in bodies and souls like humans trade in livestock.

They deserve far worse than drowning.

They deserve to suffer. To _understand_.

They never will, of course. Even if she taught them — by her words or by her actions — they still wouldn’t understand it.

So drowning will have to suffice, and her only regret is that it won’t be enough.

Her hands are black with blood, razed and raw, bruised and broken, all in the name of demons like these. A scapegoat for one, then a god-sacrifice to another. Her body is not her own; it shakes and shivers and does the most unspeakable things, a prisoner still, even after she’s earned her freedom, to the awful memories of their words and their deeds.

If Tripitaka were here, pleading with her to show compassion, perhaps she might attempt some restraint for his sake. Mercy to the undeserving; he would like that, she’s sure.

But Tripitaka is not here, and the only pleas she can hear are the ones in her own head.

She holds on to them, and to the other little gifts her senses give her: the taste of water on her tongue, the cool pulse of it in the air. These she holds as close as she can as Pigsy and his demon friends herd her down and down to their prison, to a long line of windowless, faceless cells.

Sandy is not generally prone to claustrophobia. She is certainly not prone to fear of being underground; how could she be, when she lived almost her entire life in the dark dank depths? But there is something ominous about these little tombs carved out of the rock, this prison in the middle of a labyrinth, itself in the midst of a wasteland. No need to kill their prisoners out here; they could simply leave them in their cells to rot.

She wonders how she would die, if she were left here and forgotten. Dehydration or starvation? Or would she simply suffocate on the dead, dry air?

It is a morbid thought. But then, she’s spent many years wondering which form of torment might lead to her death, and she has more than a passing experience with most of those options; why break the habit now, just because this is an ordeal she might actually survive?

 _Might_.

She doesn’t look back at Pigsy. She can’t afford to lose her nerve by watching him lose his.

Head bowed, senses turned forward, she swallows down the rising dread and keeps moving.

The prison’s cells seem blessedly unoccupied. Hard to know for sure, as she can’t see inside, but the silence from within is like a dead weight on the already heavy air: no moaning or groaning, no indignant shouts or cries or pleas for help, no sound at all that she can make out. If there are any other gods here, they’re either resigned to whatever hellish fate awaits them or they’re in no condition to make their presence known.

Both telling, both terrible; she’s not sure she wants to know which is more likely.

She really, really hopes the cells really are as empty as they sound.

A few paces ahead, their leader stops outside one of the cells. Indistinguishable from all the others, the inside is blocked by a heavy, featureless door. No bars or windows, no ventilation or view, nothing but carved, solid stone. A tomb indeed, Sandy thinks, and wills her throat not to close up.

The demon glances back at her, eyes glittering in the dark, eagerly seeking out panic or horror. Sandy lifts her chin, squares her shoulders, and shows none.

Deprived of his amusement, he takes his time unlocking and opening the door, revealing the cell that is to be her new home. Pitch-dark, dry as sand, and very small, it’s clearly not meant to hold its prisoners for long.

The unfamiliar claustrophobia tightens its grip.

Sandy takes a couple of dusty breaths, then swallows, imagines it’s water and not decay that slides down her throat, cooling instead of razing her. Eyes closed, she pictures it as clearly as she can: the hoard they’ve got hidden nearby, chilled and carefully packed, close enough that she can reach out and feel it, taste it, _use_ it—

Her spine straightens. Her mouth remembers what it’s like to be filled with moisture. Her shoulders slacken.

Watching her, the demon’s eyes narrow. He doesn’t appreciate her wordless defiance, and he is all too happy to make a show of his power, imagining her as easily intimidated as Pigsy.

“Get in,” he snarls, like the lash of his tongue could hurt her.

Sandy locks eyes with him, teeth bared, letting a little of her wild, violent self show through in her eyes. Letting him know, if he cares to see, that she is not one to be toyed with.

Letting him know too much, perhaps.

His anger is as explosive and sudden as her own: too fast for even her quick reflexes to pick up, he spins her around and drives his boot into the small of her back. His strength, though not enough to save him when the time comes, is impressive enough to send her sprawling; she lands on the ground, face-first, choking on a mouthful of dust.

Pigsy makes no move to assist her this time; when she raises her head and turns to look back he’s standing on the threshold watching her with shadowed eyes. If there’s any regret or sympathy in them, it’s too dark to see.

In a fit of generosity Tripitaka would be proud of, Sandy tells herself that must be it. Too dark, and perhaps he’s afraid of making things worse by blowing their cover. The moment is precarious enough as it is, and his demon friend seems to be watching him very closely.

Still, for all that he must realise he’s playing with fire, he can’t seem to stop himself from blurting out, “Just sit tight, yeah?”

Sandy huffs, biting down hard on her tongue. “Easy for you to say.”

The demon, meanwhile, quirks a bemused brow. “Are you serious?”

“Ah.” Pigsy gulps audibly; from her position on the ground Sandy can’t make out his expression, but she assumes it’s appropriately abashed. “Well, you know. Does no harm to play nice, right? Where they’re going, it’s not like they’re going to see a whole mess of friendly faces.”

The demon thins his lips, unimpressed but not noticeably suspicious. Apparently his earlier insult was not hyperbole; Pigsy’s compassion towards his fellow gods is clearly not without precedent.

“You really are getting soft,” the demon snorts, affirming the point. “But if that’s what you want, the only heartbreak will be your own, so be my guest.” He shrugs. “Best stand back, though.”

Sandy thinks little of this instruction, but apparently it carries some insidious meaning to Pigsy because he blanches almost as pale as her and scrambles backwards a good three body lengths.

“Is that really necessary?” he gurgles.

The raw panic in his throat lashes Sandy’s survival instincts into action. She leaps back up onto her feet, fists spasming and jaw whitening with tension. She doesn’t immediately recognise the danger, but she has lived in fear for too much of her life not to know that there is one.

Pigsy’s responses tell a damning, frightening tale. Wide eyes, sweat beading on his brow, his mouth agape as he inches back and back and back; whatever is causing this distress it is far more sinister than a mere warning to keep his fingers and toes away from a slamming door.

“Is _what_ necessary?” she demands, hearing her breath catch on the mouldering air.

The demon laughs, cold and calloused, like she’s somehow proven a point for him.

“As you can see,” he remarks to Pigsy, “it most certainly is necessary. However docile or pathetic they may appear, these creatures are still gods, and they still hold power.” He narrows his eyes, casual conversation seeming to shroud a deeper, more pointed threat. “You should know that better than most, yes?”

Pigsy deflates, wincing. “Look, can we just—”

“Absolutely not.” Even in the near-perfect dark, Sandy can see the threat gleaming in his pale eyes. “There is room enough for two in there, you know. Locke will grow bored of you eventually, and when she does...”

“All right, all right.” Looking distraught, Pigsy ventures a glance at Sandy, mouth twitching, like he’s trying to force down a plea or an apology. “Get on with it, then, if you bloody must.”

The demon curls his lip. “Why, thank you for your generous permission.”

And without any further preamble, he reaches into his tunic and draws out a little rust-coloured pellet, about the size of a large marble.

Sandy has never seen anything like it before, but she doesn’t need to know what the thing is to guess at what it does. This she can gauge well enough from Pigsy’s body language, his expression, the guilt turning his face to ash, the way his legs keep churning up dust, hauling his body back and back and back, putting space between himself and her, himself and the cell, himself and—

And what he knows is going to happen next.

What they both should have realised would.

The inevitability of it fills her head with vertigo, fills her chest with panic. Her body seizes, bracing so effectively for what it knows will happen that it feels almost like she’s enduring its effects prematurely:

Her lungs full of smoke. Her head full of cotton. The pounding of her heart, the maelstrom in her mind, helplessness and dread in the moment before she loses consciousness.

She should have anticipated this. So should he. It’s the only weapon demons have against the wrath and power of gods, and he used it on her often enough to guess that his new friends would certainly do the same.

Stupid of him not to think. Arrogant of her not to expect—

No matter. She’s here, she’s trapped, and she can’t stop it.

Like him, she starts to inch backwards, but unlike him she’s stuck in this awful cell; there’s nowhere to go, nowhere to hide or retreat or escape, nowhere that is safe or sheltered or protected. She is trapped, she is cornered; she’s already at their mercy, just as she was once at his, and they’re about to make her even worse, just like he did.

They’ll throw the thing in with her, and the cell will fill with smoke and so will her lungs; it will dig its roots into her head, her nerves, paralyse her and knock her out, and she will go down, down, down, just like she did a thousand other times, they’ll take her, pick her apart, make her weak, make her _helpless_.

“No!” She doesn’t recognise her own voice, it’s so small and frightened. “No, not that, not—”

Pigsy turns away. He looks like he’s going to faint before she does. “Better hold your breath.”

It’s not just friendly advice from a worried companion. She can see from his expression, shadows throwing the lines on his face into bold relief, that he’s genuinely fighting off panic, that for all his preparation and presupposition he really didn’t anticipate this. Forgotten, in his haste to stop her from throwing herself into trouble, or else he simply failed to take into account that demons like their gods compliant, yielding and subdued, unable to cause trouble.

Failed to take into account too, it seems, that he himself used this very trick countless times over the years.

Well, perhaps she’s as much to blame for that as him. Didn’t she endure it often enough to anticipate this as well?

Then: a ragged, starving wretch of a thing, a god wearing the face of a demon, pinned down and cornered, forced into a role she never wanted to play. She had a thousand reasons to be afraid back then, of the smoke, the drugs, the helplessness it brought. She had no allies, no friends; the world hated her when she was strong, and hated her even more when she was weakened and at their mercy.

A thousand reasons to be frightened back then.

But now...

She won’t let herself be frightened of this again.

She will not be—

She _is_ not afraid. 

She reminds herself, urgently, desperately, that she is in a better position than most to endure this. That she is more powerful than they can possibly, know, that she—

That _he_ helped her to become that way.

One of the many little advantages he gave her, probably without even realising it. They’ve drugged her into obedience countless times over the years, made her pliant and malleable again and again and again, so much that she’s built up an impressive tolerance for the stuff. It works its way through her quickly now, allowing her to regain consciousness more swiftly than most and recover her senses — what little of them still remain after a lifetime of blows to the head — without much difficulty.

She is used to this particular form of subjugation.

She is— 

_Usually_.

In the sewers or the streets, that little pellet would be no match for her. Even in Locke’s spacious, well-built dungeon it only took her out of commission for just as long as the demon witch needed to get her locked up.

But down here...

Here in the dust and the dark, in this airless, lightless coffin they call a prison cell?

She’s never been stuck in a space this small. No windows, no bars. No ventilation.

Here, the stuff will linger.

On the air, in her lungs, inside her head. It will linger longer than it should, and she—

She is already so volatile.

She has made no secret of this. She is volatile and she is violent, she is a wild and dangerous thing, a crack in the rock just waiting for the right kind of pressure to burst through and blast it all to pieces. Her control is tenuous, tremulous, and with that stuff inside her it will only get worse. If she doesn’t — if she _can’t_ — keep herself under control...

No.

That’s not an option.

She will.

Smoke or no smoke, drug or no drug, she will hold herself together.

She will use the presence of water as a tethering line, an anchor to keep her from drifting too far away from herself. It’s why she agreed to this in the first place, isn’t it? So long as she has water at her hands, nothing else matters. He can fail or fall, let her down, betray her, do whatever he likes, but so long as she has water...

She will survive this.

She will let her lungs fill with smoke and she will breathe water, and she will survive.

She will—

She _will_.

But for now, she heeds Pigsy’s advice: she draws in as much of the dry, dust-clogged air as she can take without choking, and holds her breath.

The demon rolls his eyes. “Gods,” he sighs. “Always so melodramatic.”

Then he laughs, tosses the pellet in, and slams the door shut behind him.

*

The darkness is all-devouring.

So is the silence, punctuated only by the tiny _ping_ of impact as the pellet hits the stone floor, and the subtle, terrifying _hiss_ as the smoke begins to escape.

The silence she can endure, so long as she keeps her mind locked on the whispers of nearby water. But the darkness...

Sandy has always been comfortable in the dark. Content, even. The cold, empty nothing always brought her comfort; it’s warmth and sunlight that frighten her. The underground, the sewers, the murky depths of a canal, the grime of an alley: all of these, safely sheltered in shadows, she knows as intimately as her own skin, each one a home of a different sort.

But even in her darkest, most shadowy places, there was always some light. A dapple of moonlight, the shimmering whisper of a torch or a candle, a hazy glow from a nearby home. Windows and bars, grates and grilles, holes in the walls and the ceilings and the world: light, even in the darkest corners, finding its way in through whatever little cracks and crevices it can find.

There is none of that here. No cracks, no crevices, and no light.

The little cell is as dark as a tomb, as dark as when she has her eyes squeezed shut. As dark as the blood-soaked haze that blurs her vision on her the days, when the world narrows down to black and red, to pain, violence, hunger, and fear.

She thinks she hears her own heartbeat, an endless thudding that bounces off the too-close walls. Louder than the hiss of escaping smoke, louder than the water whispering inside her head, louder than her thoughts and her memories, louder the voices that were her only friends. Her heart, her pulse, her blood; it reminds her that she is alive, and it reminds her that she is entirely alone.

Her lungs hurt. She hasn’t let herself breathe yet, but she can feel her chest heaving, the desperation and dread shaking her ribs like prison bars.

She has less than a minute, she thinks. Less than a minute before the ache in her lungs sharpens too much to keep holding, less than a minute until survival kicks in and forces her to breathe in, until the smoke and the drug dig their roots inside of her, until she—

 _No_. Panicking will only make it happen quicker.

She closes her eyes, her mind, her throat. She—

She doesn’t breathe.

If not for the absolute darkness, the walls closing in, the dry, rancid air, this would be nothing new. As familiar as her own pulse, the hiss of smoke and the dizziness it brings. Losing consciousness, coming around in fits and starts, recovering herself in bits and pieces. Trying to remember why her tongue tastes of blood or why her hands are drenched in it, whether the pounding in her head is from the smoke or from a concussion or from something else entirely.

She’s been through this moment so many times.

At his hands, she’s been through it. To her, he did this. And she—

Her lungs burn. She gulps a hasty breath.

Her head gets fuzzy almost immediately; her balance shifts, the disorientation made worse by the total dark. Vertigo with no point of horizon to steady her; she sways, lurches, pitches forward, but she doesn’t—

Won’t. _Can’t_.

She remembers the last time this happened: coming around in Locke’s prison with Monkey. She remembers seeing him lying there on the other side of the cell, twitching and moaning and still very much unconscious, remembers thinking how strange it was that he, so strong and all-powerful, would still be sleeping while she shrugged off the smoke’s effects like a second cloak.

She appreciated the privacy granted by his nightmare-touched slumber. She remembers this too: vertigo, just like now, nausea and confusion and all the other side-effects that come with being drugged. It was an unexpected luxury to ride those things out in relative peace, without interruption or assault, a luxury to let her senses return in their own time, unafraid of when the voices would start, or the threats and the blows. 

She remembers feeling grounded, soothed by watching him sleep.

How strange, she thought, still somewhat delirious, to have a friend.

She remembers the first time this happened as well, as different from the last as two moments could possibly be. Waking up in that filthy alley with Pigsy standing over her, blocking out the sun, the world, everything. She remembers the sluggishness, the disorientation, the way her body tilted and lurched, the way it felt like it was no longer hers. It was a lifetime, the first time, before the stuff left her completely, a lifetime before she was able to stand, speak, move, breathe, without losing her balance.

And all the while, as she drifted and stumbled and failed to focus her eyes, there he was: Pigsy, touching her, his hands at her back and her face, so gentle, so full of what she thought was compassion. And all the while, as she let herself imagine those things might actually exist, he was calling her _demon_ and _worthless_ and _scapegoat_.

She wasn’t really afraid. Even as her body betrayed her, she was not afraid. Only angry, only wild, only—

Only the monster they made her. The awful creature that lived in the dark, that stole food and children and worse, that would do anything to survive.

Even kill.

And she did.

And they—

The darkness, inky and all-devouring seems to blur. There is nothing there, only vague shimmers of black and grey, but somehow she can tell it’s blurring even so. Her head is swimming, her thoughts all coming together and then flying apart, shards and pieces sharp enough to cut herself on.

The alley, Pigsy. The prison, Monkey. One her friend, the other her enemy, but she can’t remember which was which, she can’t remember, she can’t—

She’s breathing again, choking and ragged. Her chest is heaving. She’s gulping toxic air with the ravenous, urgent desperation of the almost-suffocated.

Seconds now, if she’s lucky. A few seconds, no more, to ground herself in who she is, a few seconds to find something to hold onto, a few seconds to—

She feels, dimly and distantly, the _crack_ of impact as her head hits the ground.

It is the last thing she feels before the darkness rises up to swallow her whole.

*

She dreams of water.

Torrents, tsunamis, tidal waves. Oceans and rivers and waterfalls. Water everywhere, clean and fresh and wonderful, so much of it she feels like she could just dive in and drift off into oblivion, disappear like the light and the world and the thoughts inside her head, like she could just close her eyes, float away, and never be seen again.

They’d like that, she thinks hazily.

Then again, maybe they wouldn’t.

Not having to worry about her any more, the demon-faced sewer-dwelling thing, the streets safe again from the monster they made. But then, where would they be without their precious scapegoat? Who would endure all their hurt and their hate so Locke wouldn’t have to? Who would be there to throw in front of the slavering crowds like a twisted, emaciated corpse for the carrion birds to pick clean?

Would they find another, she wonders. Leave her memory to rot and dig up some other hapless soul?

Would she want them to? Could she bear the thought of sacrificing someone else to that dreadful fate?

Perhaps if she were more like him. If she were cold-blooded, ruthless, if her only thought was of herself, of luxury and comfort and abundance. Perhaps then, she could condemn another to playing her part. Perhaps—

But she is not. The one part of being a god she knows she got right. The one part that Pigsy got so, so wrong.

Sometimes she yearns for that kind of freedom so badly it hurts. To be so cold, uncaring, to not be what she is. 

Sometimes—

No. _Water_.

It’s the only thing in the world that matters. She remembers that, even if she can’t quite remember why.

 _Water_ , free-flowing and beautiful. Cool on her tongue when it’s parched, cool on her body when it burns and bleeds and breaks, cool inside her where the blood boils and bubbles and bursts. Swirling through her veins when there isn’t enough left in there to sustain her, balming her lungs when she can’t breathe, wrapping itself around her hands when she has no other weapon.

 _Water_ , with all its great, terrible, wonderful power. Water, always close, always there, always _hers_. Always ready, no matter what they did to her.

She drowned three of them once, in seconds.

A bad night, she remembers, even before that. They’d caught her twice already, filled her head and lungs with so much smoke and confusion she couldn’t see straight. Her legs kept giving out when she tried to run, her fingers too slippery to hold onto her scythe, her vision too blurry to take aim even if she could have found the strength to take a swing.

Which she could not.

Which they had made sure she could not.

They’d become rather adept at using her.

But not adept enough.

So arrogant of them to assume they knew everything about her, to assume that they had nothing to worry about simply because she was drugged and nearly delirious, too dazed to hold her weapon, too dizzied to—

She might have taken a blow to the head as well. She couldn’t really remember.

All she knew was that they’d chased her beyond the edges of town, out to the places where no-one with their senses intact would ever dare go. Foul-smelling and rancid, the place where the sewers poured out their waste to pollute the river.

The worst possible place for three humans to corner a desperate, disoriented god.

They thought the advantage was theirs; they thought they had her trapped. They’d only ever seen her fight with her weapons, her body, her speed and strength. They had no idea — and why would they? — that they had herded her towards an arsenal. A hundred thousand droplets of danger all ready and waiting for her to take their power and pressure into herself, control it, control them, control—

She didn’t hesitate.

Not even a second.

Perhaps if she were more in control of herself, she would have.

The irony of that made her laugh, high and just slightly crazed.

Their doing, all of it. She was drugged, she was delirious, she was dazed. If they’d left her with more of her senses, more able to think, perhaps her moral compass might have guided her to a less deadly recourse. _They’re human,_ it might have reminded her, and the part of her that recalled what it was to be a god might have realised that this was important, that it meant something. There were lines a god should never cross, places they could not come back from.

If she were herself — if they’d let her be herself — she would have known that.

But she was not herself. They hadn’t let her be herself in years; they’d made her up so perfectly as something else, in moments like this her mind and body had no idea what ‘herself’ even meant. There was nothing left of her moral compass in the confused, drugged-up mess that was her head, nothing left of restraint or control in her ravenous wreck of a body. There was room only for one thought: _survive_.

And so she did.

Uncontrolled, unseeing, unaffected by their sudden screams. She tore the water from the river, waste-heavy and blacker than their hollow human hearts, and she hurled it at them again and again and again. There was no shortage out here, not of water or of waste, and she used every drop of it she could grasp.

They never stood a chance, and she was in no condition to give them one.

Half-blind, half-crazed, half-dead, there wasn’t enough left of her to feel horrified by what she’d done. Only enough to register, from a detached distance, as if her body belonged to someone else, that she was exhausted.

She collapsed when it was over, face-first on the sodden ground, and felt nothing.

There was nothing to feel. Nothing left inside her, no strength, no power, no fear or pain or hate; only the endless, fathomless exhaustion. The ground seemed to lurch and tilt beneath her; above, the sky arced and wheeled and spun. She was dizzy, she was sick, she was empty, but she was alive.

This she held close as the world began to dissolve.

Aware only in the faintest part of herself that she was out in the open, exposed and vulnerable, easy pickings for any monster that might choose to prowl the night. Aware much more tangibly of the fact that she couldn’t move even if she wanted to, that she was only moments away from unconsciousness. Hazily aware of both of these truths, she held close the only meagre comfort she had: the memory of water, of power, of their screams descending to gurgles, to bubbles, to the evaporation of air and the slow collapse of their lungs.

She felt it happen. She felt the water pressing against their fragile human insides, felt it crush the life out of them. She felt them die, one by one, and knew that it was her doing.

It should have sickened her. To take the lives of humans, to do it in such a visceral, brutal way: she knew that it was bad, and she knew that it made her bad too. But she was alive and they were not, and though she tried and tried to claw back some tiny part of herself that cared, there was no more left of her compassion than there was of her power. Her heart, like her body, like her mind, like every other part of her, was too exhausted to care.

So she stopped trying. She let the world dissolve like it wanted to, let the sky fall down on top of her, a storm-heavy blanket that felt so much softer than she deserved. She let the muddy ground catch her as she tried and failed to stand, as she fell again and failed to find purchase. Water above, water below, and water inside her too. It was everywhere, it was everything, it was the only thing, and it held her, held her, held her...

She slept.

Surrounded by water, she slept, and dreamed that she was somehow safe and trapped at the same time. Delirious, the drug still heavy in her lungs and her head, she dreamed that her body was able to drown.

Fitting, she thought when she woke, and then she slept again for a long, long time.

He was there the next time she woke.

Pigsy. Standing over her body like a mountain, staring down at her like a giant about to pass judgement. Still reeling and dazed, Sandy didn’t recognise him at first as the same gargantuan god who had named her demon, who had named her scapegoat, who had made her a monster so they wouldn’t realise it was him all along, that he was the monster, he was the creature from their nightmares, the horror who stole their food and their lives.

When she did finally recognise him, some few moments later, she found it was almost a relief.

No hope of escape now; she was too tired, too weak, too lost.

Too tired to care, either, what he did to her now that he could.

“Suppose you’ll end me now,” she managed, squinting up at him. “For what I did to your men.”

He looked sad. She hated that.

“You know I won’t do that,” he said. “But you killed them. Humans, bloody humans, and you did them in like they were...” He trailed off, unable to speak. A sigh and a shake of his head, and the ground under Sandy’s head seemed to shudder. “Do you know what that means? Do you understand what you’ve done?”

Of course she did. It was the only thing she did understand, the only thing in the swerving, swaying, upside-down world that she could understand at all, the only thing in the world that had ever, ever mattered.

“Survived.” Her voice was stronger than her body. “I _survived_.”

Pigsy turned away. She thought she saw water on his face as he began to walk off, but she knew that couldn’t be right. She’d drained the river dry, there was none left.

“Yeah,” he whispered, almost too soft to hear. “Yeah, you did.”

And as her eyes began to roll back, as the clouds descended to smother her once more, she thought she saw his massive shoulders begin to shake.

*

He’s standing over her still when she wakes again.

No river. Surrounded by stone walls, stone floors, stone ceiling. The hum of evil magic all around her, so loud it makes her skull vibrate inside her head. 

She doesn’t know where she is or how she got there.

What she does know is that she can’t see. The darkness is everywhere, blinding and terrifying; she can’t make out anything but the blue-black nothing and the silhouette of his big, broad body. She would recognise him anywhere, even drugged, even unconscious, maybe even dead. She spent so many years learning to recognise his footsteps, his voice, the shadows thrown by his form when he catches the sunlight, moonlight, firelight. His happiness is her suffering, his presence is her pain. Of course she’d know it’s him, even in total darkness.

Those are the only things she knows: that she is trapped, and that he is here.

Her head is throbbing, her mouth sticky and her stomach sour, and she can’t seem to draw a breath through the dirt-clogged, too-dry air. She remembers only what her senses tell her: smoke in her lungs, drugs addling her mind, the air too dry and the room too small, the darkness swallowing everything. She remembers dust, sand, the taste of it like decay on her tongue; she remembers being fearful and furious, but she can’t remember why.

 _Bad_ , she thinks. _Very bad_.

And then, instantly, worse.

Worse because Pigsy is not content this time to simply stand over her and gloat.

Worse because he’s bending over, speaking words she can’t put together in a voice she doesn’t know, worse because he’s reaching out, both hands massive and open, reaching out to—

“Don’t touch me!”

Slurred and unintelligible; if she didn’t know what she was trying to say, she wouldn’t understand it either.

Little wonder that he doesn’t respond. Little wonder that he keeps coming at her, bowed almost double now, crouching on his haunches until he’s nearly down at eye-level with her, until his face fills her field of vision, until she can’t see anything but him, his dark, twinkling eyes, the sadness, the sorrow, the—

She growls and lurches backwards. 

She—

She _tries_ to lurch backwards.

But her body betrays her again, just as it did that day in the alley, just as it did a thousand times after, a thousand doses and a thousand moments. Again, she is helpless, again she is weakened, again she is _his_.

She slumps onto her side, useless. Head pounding, nerves screaming. No matter how hard she tries she cannot will her limbs to move.

He grits out a curse. “Seven hells, how much of that stuff did you get in you?”

Sandy tries to lift her head, but it’s as heavy and useless as a leaden weight. Her body is shrieking at her to fight or to flee, to do whatever it can to keep itself alive, throw herself at him or throw herself past him, but she can’t make it do either of those things. She can’t move, can’t think, can’t even will her mouth to speak.

Her throat is razed raw, her mouth impossibly dry. She needs water. She needs—

 _Water_.

The word resonates inside her head, like a tuning fork catching the perfect pitch of a note she should know, like the clicking into place of two pieces from a whole she doesn’t know and can’t see. It is important, she remembers this, but she can’t remember why.

Pigsy repositions himself in front of her. “Sandy!” he hisses, surprisingly low. “Pull yourself together, will you? We have to—”

Her snarl cuts him off. Wild and unhinged, it’s close to a howl, a roar, a scream.

His throat clicks audibly as he swallows, then he sighs and reaches for her again. Sandy tries again to move, to attack him or else cower in the nearest corner, but what little power her body had is completely gone now, drained by the guttural noises still echoing in her throat.

She can’t even lift her head.

She is helpless. Again, she is at his mercy, again she is pliant and yielding, again she is vulnerable and weak and worthless. Her head is fuzzy with demon drugs and there’s nothing she can do to clear it, only wait and count out the heartbeats while it slowly dissipates, breathe and breathe and breathe until her lungs are clear, until she’s breathing in clean air, good air, air that won’t poison her or make her confused, air that won’t drive her unconscious and leave her body weak and exposed under his hands.

His hands...

His—

He’s gripping her arms.

He’s shaking her, firm but not rough, calling her name over and over again like he thinks it’s a weapon, like he’s throwing it — throwing her, maybe — against something solid, a wall or a door, trying to bash it down with the power of his voice.

His voice is incredibly powerful. She knows this. He’s broken her bones with it; he’s sent men to their deaths with it. He should be able to open doors with it, or shatter walls.

Why he needs her name, she can’t begin to fathom.

She shakes her head, snarls again, and then again.

“I’ll kill you.” Her voice has power too, she thinks. “I’ll kill you just like I killed them. I’ll drown you, I’ll fill your lungs with water like you filled mine with smoke. I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll—”

“Snap out of it!” Unaffected by her curses, he shakes her again. “We need to get out of here, right now. So if you don’t...”

He stops, glancing hurriedly over his shoulder. Sandy tries to follow his gaze, but she can’t see anything, couldn’t even try to guess what he’s looking for. 

Either way, the moment passes quickly, and he turns back to her with renewed vigour, tightening his grip, shaking her again and again, harder, stronger, more roughly, digging his fingers into the flesh of her arms like he’s trying to bruise them, like he’s trying to break them, like he’s trying to—

He’s trying to kill her.

Has to be; it’s the only thing that makes sense.

It’s the only thought she can muster, storm-tossed and seasick as she is. It carves through the scrambled mess of her mind, becomes an anchor, a tether, a rock to hold on to while the winds batter and flay her. It is survival, it’s the life forced on her for as long as she can remember; even when she understands nothing, even when she’s drugged and confused and knocked about, she will always, always find survival.

It runs in her veins, boils in her blood, it feeds her and nourishes her, keeps her alive when there is nothing else. Survival, running, flowing, rippling, clean and pure and precious, just like—

 _Water_.

The word slams into her again: a memory, a sensation, a threat and a promise and beautiful, blessed lifeline.

 _Water_. Yes. That’s why she’s here, that’s why—

She can’t remember, exactly.

But she does remember water, and as she reaches out, straining with every ounce of strength she has, she can feel it too.

 _Water_ , there behind the walls. Pure and wonderful and copious, _water_. 

Lots of it. Enough to drown him, enough to drown everyone. All the monsters she can hear but can’t see, the monsters she knows are surely lurking out there beyond the dark. All the demons, all the humans, all the god-faced nightmares like him, all the awful people who would trap her and drug her and hurt her and—

No. 

Never again.

 _Never_.

Her chest is heaving. Panic, pain, the urgent need to draw air into her drugged, desperate lungs. She doesn’t know which of those things are most prominent, and she doesn’t care. She can’t think about it, can’t let herself get distracted again by her traitorous body. She can only afford to think about the water, the whispers in her mind, the delicate voices of friends she’d almost forgotten, friends who may never have existed.

 _Water_ , she thinks, and it is a plea and a prayer all at once, a promise and a threat to Pigsy and all the other monsters who dwell in this dark, awful place. No matter where they are, no matter what they — what _he_ — has planned for her. She will kill them all, starting with him, before any one of them can lay a hand on her, before they can touch her, before they can—

The pressure in her head is unbearable. Aching, pounding, like the rolling of thunder, like a hurricane tearing across the open ocean, like the crack in the air before the lightning, before the downpour, before—

It fills her. It pours in through the cracks in her head, in her skin and her bones. It fills her completely, no matter that she can’t reach it, can’t hold it, can’t carry it. It fills her, water and pressure and _power_ —

The ground shudders beneath her.

She thinks she’s imagining it, another trick of her fuzzy mind. But then it happens again, and then again, and she squints up through the haze to find Pigsy staring at her with naked terror in his eyes.

“Gonna need you to calm down.” His voice is quaking as hard as the ground, the walls. “Now, yeah?”

Sandy snarls at him again. The pressure in her head worsens; the whole world seems to be shaking now.

Pigsy swallows hard. “Seriously,” he says, and the steadiness in his voice does not reach the rest of his face. “You need to snap out of this, calm down, and remember that I’m on your bloody side. Okay?”

The words find purchase somewhere, jolting her like a slap, but she still doesn’t understand what they mean.

His presence looms, blinding her, trapping her, making angry and frightened and wild; she can’t process any kind of existence where he is not her enemy, where he would not want to do her harm. It burns, the fear-pain-rage, a lifetime of muscle memory and survival instincts, of reflexes so sharp she’ll never be able to smooth them down. His face is a threat, his body is a threat, his voice is a threat, even when it’s low and urgent, even when it tries to be soft.

 _He_ is a threat, and she has to destroy him.

She has to end it, she has to end him, she—

She throws herself forward, limbs uncoordinated and sluggish, but moving a little at last. Her body is still mostly useless, but the fresh attempt at motion helps her to focus, helps her to catch hold of the water again, hearing and feeling its whispers as they turn to roars in her head, pressure expanding and then contracting, more and more and—

The ground shakes again, then heaves, violently enough that it throws even Pigsy to the ground.

She realises, dimly, that this is her doing, that the pressure in her head is spilling out through the cracks in the seething, magically-charged wall. She recognises it, but she can’t make it make sense; she doesn’t care about the rock, the walls, the ground, she doesn’t care about anything in this place at all, she only wants the _water_ —

Pigsy staggers back up to his knees, looking around himself in horrified helplessness. Sandy wants to lunge at him, take advantage of his distraction, use it to hurt him, make him bleed, make him _burn_ —

The ground is shuddering like an earthquake. The walls are broken, little cracks growing wider, pressure and force shoving back the rock, the magic, the world like it’s nothing at all. She thinks she sees water start to spill through the cracks but she’s not sure, she’s not sure of anything, only that she needs to fight, needs to be strong, needs to be powerful, needs to be—

Pigsy grabs her by the shoulders. Shakes her again, hard enough to rattle her already scrambled brains.

Sandy ignores him this time. She clings tighter to the promise of water, concentrates with her whole self on the pressure, the power, the only salvation she has. She hears a groan from somewhere above, the creak of something starting to buckle, but she can’t think about that now, can’t think about anything, she has to focus, she has to find the water, she has to—

He stops shaking her. She can see the fear in his eyes, wide and pupil-blown in the dark as he pulls back to peer into hers, piercing them, piercing her. Scanning, searching, scouring her face for comprehension, for understanding, for some small measure of recognition, and when he doesn’t find it he lets her go and throws up his hands in despair.

“Only one thing for it, then,” he sighs, almost to himself. Then to her, with seemingly earnest regret, “You’re going to hate me for this. But trust me: you’ve given me no other choice.”

Sandy’s mouth is suddenly filled with moisture; she rears back and spits at him. Tries one last time to throw her body at him but instantly falls, crippled as the pressure in her head gets worse.

Pigsy leans back just a little. Dimly, hazily, Sandy sees him readying a fist, sees the muscles bunching in his huge arm; it takes her a long, stupid moment to realise what he’s about to do.

Instinctively, she tries to cry out, to demand — to beg, even, if that’s what it takes — that he stop, but he’s not looking at her any more. Like maybe he can’t bear to, like maybe it hurts him more than the blow is about to hurt her; he’s twisting away from her, his face and half his body turned as far away from her as he can go, like he’s resisting the action even has he readies himself for it.

She doesn’t understand his reluctance. It’s not like him, not like them, not like anyone who’s ever raised a fist against her before. She doesn’t understand why he won’t meet her eye, why he’s not relishing the promise of violence, delighting in the moment before impact, the moment before he—

“I’m really sorry,” he says, and Sandy doesn’t understand that either. “Really. But you’re out of your head, and you’re about to bring this whole bloody place down on our heads.” He sets his jaw; even in the darkness Sandy can see it turning almost white. “You’ll thank me, if we survive.”

And he squeezes his eyes shut, groans, and swings.

Pain slams into the side of her head, a bone-crunching blow that throws her back to the ground. Stars flood her vision, and what little control she’d had evaporates completely: the pressure in her head builds to a vivid crescendo, overpowering her just as surely as the impact does, bruises blooming ink-black all across her field of vision, and she can’t—

At the fringes of her awareness, she hears the water screaming.

She holds on for perhaps a second longer, clinging to it like it’s the only thing in the whole world. But it’s impossible to try and fight so much pain, her body reeling from the blow, her mind reeling from the pressure, and it’s too much, it’s too much, it’s too—

She feels the pressure burst in her head, feels something deep inside her _explode_ —

And in the instant before it takes her down, the rest of the world explodes as well.

*


	7. Chapter 7

*

She comes around to a blinding headache and a fraction more clarity.

She knows where she is. She knows how she got there.

It doesn’t help even the slightest bit.

The world lies in pieces all around her. Debris, loose chunks of rock and stone scattered everywhere, ash and dust clogging the air, suspended in the faint shafts of light that drift down from high above. The walls are little more than rubble, piled as high as her bleary eyes can see; their cracked surfaces catch and hold the light, throwing it into her face until her vision dances with white.

There is nothing left of her claustrophobic little prison cell. Collapsed or destroyed or both, the whole structure seem to have been blasted clean through. She is surrounded on all sides by shattered rock; the ground beneath her back is a mess of rippled stone, like it’s been torn up and then laid back down in pieces. Jagged points and edges pierce the spaces between her ribs and under her neck; it hurts, but not as badly as her head.

That’s it: the world, as far as she can make it out. Rock, stone, debris. Broken and cracked and torn to pieces. Backwards and sideways and upside-down.

It takes her a moment to put together what she’s seeing, to reconcile the sight and sensation with what it must mean: that the whole cliff — or a pretty sizeable majority of it, at least — has come crashing down on top of her.

Was that her doing? Did she cause that?

She can’t move. The throbbing in her head intensifies when she tries to crane her neck or hoist herself up, bad enough that it threatens to knock her unconscious again, and there is something immovably heavy bearing down on her legs. Whatever happened — whatever she did — it has left her in far a more precarious position than she was in before. Pinned down, helpless, breathless, concussed, and worst of all—

 _Trapped_.

She starts to choke, dust lodging in her throat, stopping her breath. Panic, she’s certain, and the violence of it sends a blast of pain through her skull, so brutal that her vision goes blank.

For a blinded, black-soaked moment, she’s absolutely certain she is going to lose consciousness again. If she does, it will be the end of her: she’ll pass out, and this shattered upside-down world will swallow her completely. She’ll die like this, suffocated and smothered and pinned to the ground, unable to pull free, unable to—

“Sandy?”

Pigsy’s voice. Low and ragged and hoarse. He sounds like he’s frightened too, but the familiarity is enough to stave off the rising panic and bring her a little bit back to herself.

His presence, along with all its conflicted meanings, gives her mind something to do, a thousand memories to sift through and twist into something at least vaguely resembling sense. He is her enemy and he is her friend and he is her companion; she’s a monster or he’s a monster or they’re both monsters of different kinds: so many different things all at the same time, it is exactly the kind of overwhelming her horror-stricken body needs.

It rushes through her like a flood, all the different versions of them both, and it takes her sluggish brain a few seconds to piece it all together, to remember which ones were past and which are present, who they were and who they are now.

And where. And why. And—

The barren lands, the demon sentinels, and their water supply.

Smoke in her lungs, confusion, fear, _power_...

She lets out a miserable groan. “This was my doing, wasn’t it?”

Between the dim half-light and the spots dancing in front of her eyes, she can’t really see very well, but she thinks she catches the gleaming flash of his teeth. A grin, or perhaps a glint in his eyes; she can’t tell, but it makes her gut clench either way.

“Yeah,” he says, slow and sort of careful. “You’re getting a bit too good at the whole ‘exploding water’ thing, if you want the truth of it. Two for two now, isn’t it?”

The reminder is unwanted, and sadly undeniable. “Sorry.”

A flurry of motion as he waves a hand. “You weren’t in your right mind,” he says, rather generously. “This time, anyhow. All that stuff inside you, messing around with your brains. Tried to knock you out before you could do any proper damage, but...” He coughs. “Well. Not quick enough, I guess.”

Sandy tries to smile. It doesn’t work. “I have a hard head.”

“No kidding. I swear your skull is thicker than Monkey’s.”

He sounds strained, she notes. The usual easiness is gone from him now; he sounds like every word is a great force of effort, like he’s as unaccustomed to speaking as she is.

Like he’s in pain too, maybe.

Sandy struggles to sit up. A bad idea: her head threatens to burst, and the pressure on her legs intensifies until she can’t feel them, until they’re numb and lifeless and—

A bad sign. A very, very bad sign. She feels her pulse start to quicken again.

“I can’t move,” she rasps, thick-tongued and very scared. “Pigsy, I can’t—”

In the dark, his breath stutters.

“I know,” he says, too quiet and much too sober. “Half the ceiling came down on us. Bad enough if it were just good old-fashioned rock, but you know this whole place has the touch of demons on it.” His nervous pause suggests the touch of more than just demons; she wonders again if he had a hand in building this place as he did Locke’s prison. If he did, they’re both paying for it now. “Needs shifting, and quick, but I don’t know if...”

There are many possible endings to that sentence, none of them promising.

_I don’t know if I can move all that wreckage on my own, I don’t know if I’m strong enough, I don’t know if I’m good enough or useful enough or—_

_I don’t know if I want to go near you after you had a drugged meltdown and brought a great big bloody cliff down on top of our heads, I don’t know if you’re stable enough, I don’t know if I’m brave enough, I don’t know if we—_

_I don’t know if you’d let me, I don’t know if you’d trust me to touch you, even now, even if it means saving your limbs or saving your life or saving your—_

She stops trying to guess.

“Try,” she tells him through gritted teeth. “We need to get out of here.”

“Uh. Yeah.” Another hitch in his breath. “Easier said than done, that.”

Sandy has a sneaking suspicion she knows what he’s saying. What he’s not saying, that is, and what he’s clearly trying not to think about: that even if he succeeds in freeing her legs they’ll likely be in no condition to hold her up, much less walk or run or—

She closes her eyes, breathes, reminds herself that it’s nothing she doesn’t already know. Being rather more familiar with these sorts of injuries than him, she can guess well enough what they’ll find under all that rock, but she knows just as well — as he must realise too — that it doesn’t matter: if they don’t escape this place, it will bury them both.

So, for his sake rather more than her own — he has proven himself unable to handle even the most necessary truths, and she is not in any mood to coddle him — she pretends to believe he’s talking about something else, something a little easier to rectify.

“We’re trapped?” she presses, grateful that he probably won’t see the deception on her face.

He swallows, loud enough for her to hear it even over the rushing of blood in her ears, then musters a hasty, poorly-veiled nod. “Yeah. Uh... yeah, that’s it. Trapped. Like rats in a...”

He stops, hastily clearing his throat.

Sandy is not impressed. “A sewer?”

“Uh...” Another cough, one that brings with it an unpleasant phlegmy sound. “That is...”

Sandy waves a hand. “No matter,” she says, gesturing anxiously at her buried legs. “Try.”

Predictably, he stays where he is, as though paralysed by the thought. Sandy swallows the urge to roll her eyes; she should know better by now than to expect that he’d find the courage to do what must be done, to push down his soft stomach and squeamishness and step up to think of someone else for once.

“Listen...” he starts, sounding as shaky as her body feels. “I don’t...”

“I don’t want to hear it, Pigsy.” She doubts there’s much fire in the glare she shoots him, but apparently there’s still enough to silence him. “ _Try_.”

“Uh... okay, okay... uh...”

His breath is shallow now, and rapid, like he’s on the brink of panicking a bit himself. Typical, she thinks with some spite, that someone else’s pain would make him blanch and quake, that he would squirm and flinch like he’s the one with a cliff pressing down on his limbs, like he’s the one in pain, like he’s the one who has any reason to feel—

No.

She is not afraid. And he has no right to be either.

Not for her sake.

Compassion, Tripitaka would call it. Empathy, perhaps, to care so much about someone else’s pain that he would feel it in himself. _Kindness_ , all soft and sweet and caring.

Good for him.

But Sandy gave up on those ideals many years ago, and she finds no solace in seeing them here now. Only impatience, frustration, and a burst of anger intense enough that it makes light burst behind her eyes.

“ _Now_ ,” she snarls.

He shakes himself a little, then nods. A heavy breath, an audible swallow, and he cracks his knuckles, looking faint but determined.

“Right.” The word is a squeak. “Uh... maybe bite down on something?”

A good instruction, all things considered. Sandy nods, takes the frayed fabric of her sleeve between her teeth, and grunts, “Get on with it.”

And so, finally, he does.

Whimpering and whining the whole time, groaning and gasping like every breath is a terrible trauma, never sparing so much as a glance in her direction, like he’s worried the sight of her pale face would be enough to make him pass out. All those things broadcasting his weakness, making the task seem insurmountable, but still, for her, he does it.

Sandy tries to sit up far enough to watch. It’s all she can do, really, find something to focus on and hold it as tight as the lifeline clenched between her teeth.

Through the tears streaking her vision, she can make out his bulky form, the tension in his shoulders, the sweat pouring off him as he strains and shakes and struggles. The exertion is wearing on him almost as much as the emotion, she can tell, and wishes she could feel anything but revulsion. His soft life has made him squeamish; she imagines he’s more sickened by the thought of what he’ll find if he succeeds in shifting the rock than what might happen to her if he fails.

Easier, she supposes, if she dies like this. Easier for him to say a prayer over her closed eyes and walk away, than have to help her salvage the wreckage of her limbs if she survives.

Easier to leave than to stay. Another lesson he learned much too late.

Unfortunately for him, survival is Sandy’s greatest talent. And considering her other talents were responsible for bringing a magic-imbued cliff down onto their heads in in the first place, that’s probably saying a great deal. If she can survive her own loss of control — _another_ loss of control, the latest of far too many — then surely surviving the fallout will be no difficulty at all.

She is partially right, at least.

She survives well enough, because she is a god and because survival sings in her blood as loud as the water.

But it is not without difficulty.

Pigsy’s labours are effortful and drawn out. Perhaps he’s still feeling shaky, or else simply afraid of doing more damage than she’s already done to herself; perhaps he simply lacks some of his usual goliath strength. Sandy doesn’t ask and she doesn’t care. All she cares about is that it takes him much longer than it should to shift the rock from her legs, and that each moment’s delay is another burst of misery, each stop-start shudder rolling through her like thunder.

She doesn’t complain. For her own sake, not his; let him see that he’s making it worse, if he has the stomach to glance her way, but she will not be seen to be weak. She bites down on her sleeve, tears the fabric when it gets bad, but she does not cry out and she does not complain.

It feels like a lifetime before he’s finished, no doubt just as long for him as well, and then everything seems to happen at once. The whole world dissolves in a fraction of a second, the pressure falls away like the stomach-dropping fall from a high surface, and the sudden rush of renewed sensation — pain, numbness, pain, tingling, _painpainpain_ — is like nothing she has ever experienced.

“Done.” Pigsy’s face is pale, streaked with dirt and sweat. “You good?”

Sandy nods once, then promptly rolls over and empties her stomach.

“Perfect,” she moans, when she’s done.

It is not as hyperbolic as it probably sounds, coming as it does from her razed, bile-choked throat. She feels like her entire lower half has been pulled to pieces, but the surging pain tells her it’s just illusive: if her limbs weren’t still attached and more or less functional, they would not hurt so horribly. She is alive, and still in one piece, and that is all she needs to ensure healing. Experience has taught her many times just how much a god can mend, provided they survive the initial crush.

And she has.

Once again, her talent for survival prevails.

Just as it has a thousand times before.

So yes, she means it with sincerity: _perfect_.

She takes a moment to catch her breath, then looks up to find Pigsy standing over her with a waterskin in his hand. No doubt dangerously depleted, the bigger question is how he managed to salvage the thing in the first place.

She doesn’t ask. She tries to decline, as she always does, but this time he’s the one who won’t hear it: with a stubborn, no-nonsense gleam in his eye, he shoves the thing into her hand and refuses to let her give it back.

“Don’t start,” he says, with surprising authority. “Now’s not the time to play the bloody martyr. I’ll go and look about for more when you’re done, but let’s make the best of what we’ve still got, eh?” His expression softens, but his eyes remain diamond-hard. “You know you need it.”

She does indeed, desperately enough that she doesn’t even try to argue.

She was dehydrated even before she found him, and that was hours ago. Before their little drama to fool the demons, before the time she spent in their prison, drugged and delirious and panicking, before she brought the whole cliff down on top of them. Before she came around with a concussion and her lower half pinned down, before he dug her out and she threw up what little moisture she might have miraculously still had in her.

She was dehydrated long before any of that. Now...

Now, it’s become emergent.

Sandy may be stubborn, but she is not stupid. She knows her body’s needs, whether she wants to admit to them or not, and right now they are screaming at her loud and clear: she is exhausted and panicky all at once, vertiginous and light-headed, and though the demons’ drug has long since left her system she feels dangerously close to delirium.

Dehydration, the bad kind, and if she didn’t let the blasted cave-in kill her she’s certainly not going to let the lack of water finish the job.

She accepts the skin, but not without a petulant scowl.

“Is there anything left of their supplies?” she asks, though she can guess at the answer. She is nothing if not thorough when tearing things apart. “The ones I...”

“...blew sky-high?” He grins again, but it’s tight and very nervous. “No bloody clue. You made a right mess of this place.” He softens, seemingly in an attempt to comfort her. “But hey, who knows? I’ll take a look around, see if we get lucky.”

Sandy sighs, sipping at what little remains in the skin. It’s barely enough to wet her lips, gone long before it ever touches her tongue. She tosses the thing back at Pigsy in disgust, not even bothering to hide the misery as her stomach and throat broadcast their disappointment in sharp little spasms.

“It wasn’t pyrotechnics,” she explains, more to take her mind off the discomfort than anything else. “If that’s what you mean by ‘blowing it sky-high’.”

Pigsy grimaces. “Right,” he says, in the uneasy tone of the couldn’t-care-less. “Gotcha. Good to know.”

Sandy, unperturbed, presses on. “It was pressure. Dreadfully powerful, water pressure, if you can direct it properly. Build up enough of it, and you can break through just about anything. And they had lots, just as you said.” Regret tugs at her, a fresh kind of unpleasantness that cuts through all the other miseries. “But it wasn’t... that is, I was confused. I was...”

“You were out of your head.” He winces a little as he realises what he said, and scrambles to backtrack. “Drugged, that is. Out of your head on that stuff they doped you with. Didn’t mean it like...”

He turns away, face warming with healthy colour for the first time since she woke up. Sandy wishes it was for a good reason, comfort or the like, but she recognises the flush of shame too well.

“Like the last time,” she finishes for him. “With the others, when I lost control. The waterskin.”

The cause of all of this, she doesn’t add, but it hangs heavily on the air even so, like confession.

She was certainly out of her head then as well, and with no demons or drugs or smoke to blame it on.

Pigsy doesn’t meet her eye. “Seems to be happening a fair bit lately, doesn’t it?”

Thankful for the privacy, Sandy lets a little of the pain touch her face; she feels her jaw growing white as she clenches it, feels the sweat beading on her brow, feels the dizziness intensify. It brings a strange sort of solace — physical pain is a familiar friend to her by now, and familiarity always holds a sort of sanctuary — and a much-needed distraction; it lets her hear the words, the accusation, without feeling her instincts respond.

“It does,” she affirms, with a quiet, controlled regret. “Strange, really, because I couldn’t do it at all before.”

She means in the last prison her threw her into. Locke’s prison, with its god-built walls and its iron bars and steel chains, the distant whispers of the waterfall behind the palace, so close yet apparently so far out of reach.

She tried and tried back then. Convinced herself that she could break them out all by herself, even convinced Monkey that she could do it... but all to no avail.

All the will in the world, all the effort and exertion, and all that came out of it was a moment’s humiliation for Monkey and an hour or so of weariness for her. A trickle, no more, and the pressure in the water fizzled out as quickly as its voice inside her head.

She had too much faith back then, she supposes. So sure that things would work out, with or without her help. She wasn’t angry enough, wasn’t desperate enough, wasn’t frightened enough, and she certainly wasn’t delirious enough. Too giddy with her new-found life’s purpose, too trusting in her new friend: she was so certain that Tripitaka would find a bloodless way to rescue them, why would she exhaust herself on something so destructive?

That feeling abandons her, though, when Pigsy is there. Even when they’re all together, the four of them, with Tripitaka standing by to bathe her in his radiance, with Monkey beside her too, protecting them all with his wit and power. Even when they left him back at their campsite, she and Tripitaka, and they were alone at the stream; she remembers the way the water there seethed and bubbled and burst, the way it roiled and churned in harmony with her emotions.

Water, always the conduit through which her best and worst parts flow. Peaceful when she was at peace, and tearing down walls and buildings when she is not.

It is a problem. And she can only blame so much of this on the demons’ smoke and the lack of ventilation as it spilled into her lungs and seeped into her mind.

It is a problem, yes.

But it won’t be solved by sitting around in the dark, waiting for the rest of the cliff to collapse and bury them completely. If she wants to work through it, she’ll first have to get out of here and— 

No.

 _They’ll_ have to get out of here.

Together.

Sandy allows herself one last long look at Pigsy’s shadow-shrouded face, then she turns her attention to her screaming, debris-dusted legs.

 _One thing at a time_ , she thinks, and braces for the worst.

*

The damage is bad, as expected, but not life-threatening.

Sandy learns this on her own, because Pigsy is squeamish and shallow and can’t bear to look directly at her injuries. She learns it very slowly, because it still takes a great deal of effort to sit up without seeing spots, without almost blacking out from the throbbing in her skull. She learns it carefully, because she has discovered the hard way how dangerous it can be to not examine her injuries carefully enough.

She learns this:

Her right leg is not in particularly good shape but it is, at least, intact. Painful and bloodied, to be sure, but what tearing she can see is mostly superficial and will heal well enough if left to itself. She has walked, even run, with far worse when survival has called for it, and only suffered for a short time afterwards.

Her left leg is not nearly so lucky.

A mangled mass of muscle and shredded flesh, raw and gaping and utterly brutal, it looks bad enough that even her iron stomach recoils at the sight of it. That, far more than the pain itself, fills her with so much nausea and horror that she actually stops breathing for a second.

 _I need that leg,_ she thinks, feverish and light-headed. _I need it strong, I need it healthy. How can I defend myself against him if I can’t kick, if I can’t run, if I can’t—_

It is a long, hellish moment before she remembers she doesn’t have to.

They’re friends now. Companions, at least. They are on the same side, on the same team, on the same quest, and they are in this situation together. He is as defenceless as she is, even if he does have the use of both his legs. He can’t — no, he _won’t_ — do her any harm.

He won’t attack her now, nor will he send his men to do the job for him; he doesn’t even have them any more.

He doesn’t—

Never again will she suffer at their hands, at his orders.

Never again will he tell them to—

He did once.

Only once, but he did.

Looked at her, looked up at them, and told them without inflection that they could kill her.

Only once, but once was enough.

She remembers it well: before their paths even crossed that night, she was already halfway into the grave. 

Beaten, bleeding, broken. Not by his men for once — they could never inflict such damage on a god — but from a tussle with some of the demon sentinels that plagued Palawa now and then, swarming like locusts when rumours spread of god-blood in town. Locke hated the sentinels nearly as much as her people did, but there was little she could do against her own kind and even less she could do without having to acknowledge their strength as equal to her own.

She was smart enough to see the danger in that, of course, and so she opted for the alternative: welcoming the sentinels into her home, her town, her palace, embracing them as brothers and sisters, and ensuring that they found the gods they were after... so long as they paid the proper price.

So far as Sandy knew, Locke had never seen her face. She had no idea that the pale-haired little wretch was the scapegoat whose blood had salvaged her precious reputatio, if she even knew that such a scapegoat existed at all. Sandy had no idea if Pigsy had told her, and she wasn’t particularly inclined to ask. Ironically, the town’s tyrannical demon dictator was no threat to her at all.

Sandy had no fear of recognition from Locke, nor did she have any fear of being outed as a god by the vicious human guards who had called her ‘demon’ more times than any of them could count. The sentinels themselves were trouble, though: sharp-eyed and quick-witted, they could easily tell the difference between a demon and a god, no matter how well-hidden it thought it was.

A tussle, then, violent and bloody but quick. She’d come out the victor, but not by much: the three of them all slain, and her not so far away from the same fate.

Couldn’t make it back to the sewer. Could barely even crawl into the shadows that would be her shelter for the next few hours. She would be well enough to stand come morning, assuming she made it through the night, but until then there was little she could do but stay hidden and wait it out. Huddled in the wine-reeking alley behind the tavern, binding her wounds and waiting for the blood to slow or quicken, to release her or else to finally end her.

Either option would be fine; she just wished it would hurry up.

She tried to disappear when they stormed past, Pigsy and a couple of his favourite guards. They weren’t after her, for once, just there to break up a brawl between a crowd of drunks; if she could stay hidden, they’d pass her by without thought. So she tried, bleeding back into the shadows as best she could, making herself small and stealthy, vanishing as she had done so many times before, protecting herself, hiding, hiding, hiding—

But she was weakened, and lacking her usual deftness and talent. Her blood, pooling on the ground, caught the light of the lamps above, and Pigsy stopped to stare at it.

And then, inevitably, at her.

“All right, mate?” he asked, no doubt mistaking her for one of the tavern’s less fortunate patrons.

Sandy ducked under her hood, shrouding her features as best she could, and kept her mouth shut.

“Leave him be,” one of the guards groused, himself sounding more than a little in his cups. “We’re not paid to patch up drunken idiots.”

“Fount of bloody compassion, you are,” Pigsy snorted, then waved a hand at the blood-damp ground. “Been roughed up pretty good, from the look of it. Should probably see the poor blighter home, at least. Get him off the streets, keep him out of trouble in case his buddies come back for another round.” He peered down at Sandy, his dark eyes glimmering like he was sharing a secret. “What do you reckon, there, fella?”

Sandy wanted to spit at him, but her mouth was full of blood. She kept her head down, kept her growls and hisses to herself. Kept her face hidden, her fists tucked out of sight.

“Lot of blood there,” one of the guards observed shrewdly. “No sense wasting time moving him: poor bastard’ll likely be dead come morning anyway.” A flash of sharpness as he smiled, cool and calculating. “You really want to do him a favour, a knife to the throat’ll do the job right. End it quick, for him and for us.”

Pigsy snorted again. Amused, not disgusted; for all his so-called softness, he took the same cheap shots the rest of them did, so it seemed, when the moment was right. It made Sandy’s stomach churn, made her want to leap up and strangle him.

“You’d kill anything, given half a chance,” he said to his guard, “wouldn’t you?”

The human’s laughter grew colder at that, and earnestly cruel. Like it didn’t matter what kind of creature she was: demon, god, or human. Like he really would have slit her throat her and never thought twice about it, just so he could watch her bleed out and call it mercy.

“Like you wouldn’t let me,” he shot back at Pigsy, “if the payout was good enough.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not, is it?” There was a hardness to his tone now that wasn’t there before; it made Sandy recall their first meeting, in an alley just like this one, and she suddenly had to fight to keep from shuddering. “Killing down-and-outs and derelicts, what’s the point? The fool’s clearly broke.”

He glanced at Sandy again, features blank and expressionless; she knew him well enough by then that it was not unexpected when he gave her a nudge with his boot, kicking her onto her back to prove his point.

Ended up proving his friend’s point instead: her hood rolled back, her cloak rolled off her shoulders, and there she was, exposed and vulnerable, bleeding and battered and herself. A god or a demon, whatever they wanted her to be tonight, but theirs either way, to mistreat or abuse as they pleased.

“Oh, bloody hell.” He sounded like he was in pain, she remembers. Like he does now, recovering from a collapsed cliff, only back then she could see there wasn’t a scratch on him. He looked to his companions, quietly seething, and gritted out, “Which one of you idiots did this?”

The two humans glanced at each other, then shrugged in perfect unison. Pigsy’s expression darkened, if possible, even more.

“Right. Stupid question. Neither one of you is tough enough to take on a—” He gave a hasty, nervous-sounding cough. “Doesn’t matter. Like you said, the poor thing’s done for now.”

Sandy growled again. Feeble, to be sure, but not dead yet. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing that.

“Could take it on well enough in this state,” his friend countered, with the kind of cool arrogance she had come to expect from humans in the livery of Locke’s guard. “And looks like there’d be decent coin in it for you after all.”

Pigsy’s expression flickered, a whole journey of emotion passing across his face in the blink of an eye. Grief and pity, the too-brief almost-kindness she remembered from their first meeting, and then the equally-familiar hardness, the warmth in his eyes growing cold, like a fire extinguished to ash. Like maybe he needed that hardness to survive, just like she did.

A different kind of cloak, she thought, to hide a very different kind of weakness.

She shook off the thought quickly. Blood loss, she decided, making her delirious.

Still, he sounded almost regretful when he sighed, shook his head, and said, in a voice that almost, almost quavered, “Nah, just leave the poor thing be.”

Their laughter was vicious, and aimed squarely at him. It surprised her, she recalls, because she wasn’t used to hearing such malice turned on anyone but herself.

“Seriously?” The same one again, in the same cold tone, as if he saw nothing more in Pigsy than they saw in Sandy: a pathetic, trembling wreck of a creature, halfway in the grave and getting deeper every second. “Her Majesty’s right about you: too damn soft to get anything done.”

Even in her weakened state, Sandy could tell that the words cut deep. He didn’t flinch, but she could feel the ground shake as he dug his heels in, like it was taking a great force of effort to keep his knees from buckling.

“How do you idiots know what Locke thinks about me?”

Another round of laughter. Colder and colder, each one.

“Everyone knows, boss,” the other one said, not bothering to hide his sneer. “It’s the talk of the palace. Too soft, too clumsy, too _cowardly_.” There was no friendliness in his grin, nor in the way he slapped Pigsy’s massive, muscled back. “No good for anything, heard her say.”

“Did you, now?”

He didn’t sound particularly surprised, Sandy thought. Just tired and sad. Resigned, in a way, like a part of him knew it was true and was too worn down to even try to imagine it might not be.

She almost felt—

No. She had suffered for his ‘softness’. Again and again and again, she had suffered at his humans’ hands because he was too cowardly to do his own dirty work.

Let him cry over his weaknesses. She would not feel anything but hate.

His companions, recognising his reaction, nodded smugly at each other.

“It’s no secret,” the second one told him, winking at his friend. “Even the servants are talking about it. How they caught you sniffling over some stupid god or another, weeping over some little rodent you couldn’t save.” A laugh from the other, bolstering his courage. “Small wonder Locke’s thinking of getting rid of you.”

That was news, Sandy could tell. Between the poor lighting and her hazy vision, she couldn’t see particularly well, but there was no mistaking the way he stiffened, his entire body wracked by earnest, ill-concealed shock.

“You what?”

“You didn’t know?” Their surprise, on the other hand, was entirely fabricated. “Come on, now. We all know the kind of ship she runs. You don’t pay your way, you’re out on your ear.” Keen eyes catching his in the dark, assessing, finding the perfect place to twist the knife in. “You really thought she’d let you coast along on her skirt-tails forever? You’re not that pretty, lover boy.”

Their laughter was another blow, and then another. Excellent predators, Sandy thought, but then of course she knew that already from experience.

Pigsy allowed himself less than a moment to reel. It was all he could afford, surrounded as he was by hungry piranhas: a moment, a small flinch that gave away probably more than it should, then it was all gone. Like a shroud thrown over the moon, his expression darkened until it was as cold and empty as theirs.

“Right.”

Toneless now, like he was speaking from a void. He sounded so much like them all of a sudden, the ones who came after her again and again and again, the ones who had no qualms about hunting down demons and gods like animals, no qualms about doing the most unspeakable things even to their fellow humans in the name of ‘keeping the peace’. She had suffered a great deal at their ruthless hands, and seen others suffer far worse; she knew all too well what that coldness meant, what it had to mean in a world run by heartless, hungry monsters.

Suffer at their hands or become one of them.

She’d thought he already was. She’d thought he’d been a monster for a long, long time. She’d thought...

No matter, really, what she thought.

Because there he was, transforming again right in front of her: eyes hardening, jaw tightening and turning pale, shoulders locking and fingers clenching over the haft of his horrible rake, and the ice in his voice slithered down her spine and through her veins, spilling out onto the street with the rest of her blood, frozen and lost.

He knew what was coming, and so did she, before either of his friends said the words.

“Come on, boss man: prove her wrong.”

She knew, and so did he, that they were talking about this, now, about her body at their feet, bleeding and helpless and ripe for the slaying.

The scapegoat, the god-made demon, the pale-faced shadow who stole food and children and stalked the streets at night. Her deeds, the ones they wove out of her, would justify their cruelties: they would go back to their palace, mount her head on a pike, and shout from the balcony to the people below that it was a victory in their name, a gift of mercy from their benevolent ruler. The evil demon slain by the good one, the streets free again, its people safe at last.

She wondered if there would be a parade.

Pigsy sighed. Resignation and submission, she recognised well enough, both coated in a layer of something she thought might have been fear. Absurd, of course — he was a god, and his friends merely human — but Sandy had learned time and time again the damage that mere humans could do and she could not begrudge him the feeling she knew so well herself.

It did not surprise her, the way he bowed his head to them, cowed and subjugated, as if they held all the power and he held none at all. He could have driven their bodies into the ground with a wave of his hand or a flick of his rake, but he did no such thing; instead, twitching with dread he shrugged and shrank like a dog beaten to within an inch of its life, obedient to the even the cruellest master. Doing what he was told, even by them.

Was it Locke’s reprisal he feared, she wondered, or was it their mockery?

Whichever it was — and perhaps it was a little of both — it seemed to carry far more weight than what little remained of his conscience: he threw up his hands, muttered a string of frustrated curses, then turned his back on all three of them.

“Fine,” he said, the words shaping a sneer. “Do what you want with it.”

 _It_.

The word echoed, its meaning clear: just like that, it didn’t matter what she was. Demon or god, he no longer cared. He just wanted her name on his slaughter list, to prove to his mistress that he still had it in him, that he was still—

Still _useful_.

Which one of them, she wondered, was he really trying to make into a demon? She, the scapegoat, the vessel for his insecurities and his cowardice, or himself? To make himself heartless and soulless, to make himself a monster by slaying something worse?

No matter now, she supposed. He was done with her, and she was— 

No.

She was not done yet.

She fumbled with numb fingers, scrabbling for her belt, the little knife always sheathed at her hip. He might have forgotten his nature in his haste to remake hers, but she would never do the same. If they were intent on murdering her, she would—

She would do whatever she had to, whatever it took.

Without hesitation and without remorse.

She knew well enough that they’d waste none on her.

And she had done it before.

She was almost thankful that he didn’t stay to watch the show this time. Still too much of a coward for that, so it seemed; he would happily send the beast off to the slaughter, but heaven forbid he stick around to mop up the blood. Weak and soft to the end, just like they said.

Enough, though, in his mind and theirs. Enough for him to prove his worth, enough for them that he would turn a blind eye to their fun and games, that he would step away and let it happen rather than step forward and try to intervene. Enough that he would welcome her death this time rather than try to avoid it, try to insist that they keep her alive, that they keep her running, that they—

That they keep _her_ useful too.

Apparently she no longer was.

Outstayed her welcome, perhaps, or else he thought her death would be more helpful to him now: a corpse he could throw at his mistress’s feet and crow, _“See what I’ve done for you?”_

Sandy found that she didn’t mind. She would gladly go to her grave here tonight if it meant they wouldn’t be able to use her any more. If it meant she would no longer have to be the scapegoat for a demon she hated and a god she hated much more. If it meant she would no longer live in fear, in pain, if it meant being free from a life in a shadows, hunted and hated and—

Free of this ‘life’ he had so generously gifted her.

She would have taken it. Their assault, their swords in her chest or her gut, the end of everything.

Would have, but her survival instincts were too keen.

Her mind and her heart were willing, eager to rest at long last in peace.

But her body was not. It had fought too hard for too long to yield now.

They came at her slowly, lazily. Assuming she was too badly injured to fight back, they wanted to draw it out. Make it a game, a sport; wasn’t that all her kind were good for? Perhaps they thought too that she was like him, weak-willed and weak-bodied, weak in every conceivable way, cringing and cowardly. No fight in her, they thought, and bared their blades.

If they’d ever seen her fight against their brethren in the town square, they would know how wrong they were.

She fought them too, not like a coward fighting for escape, but like the wild, wounded thing she was. She fought for her life, even though it meant less than nothing to her; she fought like an animal, like a demon and a god and every powerful being that ever was. She fought and she fought, and she won because she didn’t know how to do anything else.

Her knife to their throats: the death they’d so generously offered her when they thought she was like them, human and drunk and poor. When they thought she was worthy of their twisted definition of mercy, when that was the only kindness she could hope for. A knife to the throat, a burst of blood, and then blessed, peaceful silence. 

A quick death. A gentle death, almost painless.

A kinder one than monsters like them deserved.

She watched their human blood spill out to mingle with hers, and felt hollow and numb. Their lives for hers: even if she didn’t make it to daylight after all, even if she really was too far gone, she had earned the right to try.

Their lives for hers.

And if she survived long enough to see him again, she would take his as well.

*

So she thought, anyway.

But then the world turned upside-down, and now apparently they’re friends. Companions, allies, teammates; Pigsy has a thousand names for what they are, and Tripitaka has a thousand more. Sandy doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to use any of them, if those words will ever hold the same meaning for her that they hold for them, but she does know that whatever they are now it’s very very different from the thing they were.

 _Enemies_.

An ugly word, yes, but the only one she had. No complexity, no nuance, no depth: _enemies_ , and that was all.

A peculiar word, though. It makes the whole thing sound so personal, when in truth he knew nothing about her. She knew rather more about him, of course, but where was the good in that when he held all the power? A word from him and her life was forfeit; she would live or die or be sold to sentinels like the ones she drowned today. A word from her, by contrast, and nothing would change at all. He’d likely never even hear it, all the way up at the top of his cherished palace, safe and sound in his lover-mistress’s arms.

Back then, as enemies, they could not have been further apart. Now...

Now, he does hear her. Every breath, every word, every sound she makes, he hears it. And where once he would have turned away before the pain began, pretended not to see or hear or know, now he stands there and watches as she examines her mauled leg, and when she cries out he does too, in sympathy and compassion.

She thinks that counts for something. She thinks—

She thinks it should, anyway.

Count for something. Mean something. Hold some sort of significance somewhere inside her. That he cares about her now, that he has recovered some of the empathy and feeling he tossed aside for a place in Locke’s bed. That he has found enough of his long-vanished courage to face down a cliff full of demon sentinels because he knows it’s the right thing to—

No. 

Because she asked him to.

She should probably thank him for that.

She doesn’t. There are more important things to worry about right now, the most pressing of which is razing her throat and her lungs until they hurt worse than her legs.

“Go and fetch more water,” she tells him. Then, because she is not yet ready to admit her dehydration aloud, “I want to bind my wounds, and they should be cleaned first.”

With a pang, she recalls Tripitaka at the stream, clucking and protective, the sweet side of humanity she’d never seen before, insisting that she clean a non-existent cut on her hand so that they might be safe in the barren lands without water or healing. She recalls her own disdain, how quick she was to point out that such a thing was unnecessary, that she was a god and would heal perfectly well without such things.

It’s as true now as it was then. Clean or otherwise, if she survived long enough to see the extent of the damage, she will surely survive to see it heal.

But it’s a good excuse to get Pigsy away from her for a little while, and to steal enough privacy to get her screaming, shaking body back under control.

More, it’s practical: they need to know how much of the demons’ water — to say nothing of their other supplies — made it through the collapse. How much life-giving sustenance they have to work with when they dig their way out of the wreckage and step back out under the blazing sun. How much time before the exhaustion, the heat, the dehydration claim them. She needs to know if it will be enough to reunite them with Tripitaka and Monkey, or if she should simply make her peace here and accept it as over.

Whether he understands the deeper reasons or not, Pigsy is kind enough to obey without question. He reaches out as if to clasp her shoulder, then thinks better of it, nods, and leaves her alone.

He’s gone just long enough for her to catch her breath. No simple task when it hurts to simply stay conscious, so perhaps she should be proud of herself that she achieves even that little victory.

She holds herself upright, bracing her palms in the debris-strewn dirt, riding out the pain as it rolls through her in waves. She holds herself still, holds herself steady, and tries to keep her mind focused on the simple, attainable tasks: not passing out or vomiting again, not purging herself of what meagre strength and resources she still possesses. Survival, a thousand horrible lessons put to good, effective use.

She holds the important questions in her mind, uses them as a tethering point to what matters. How long must they endure like this? How long before their path dovetails with Tripitaka’s? How many hours or days will she need to walk on her mutilated leg, how much food and water will they need, at a minimum, to keep them both alive out there in the unforgiving desert?

So many small questions, with so many huge, life-altering consequences.

She is still mulling them over when Pigsy comes back. He’s out of breath, but with good reason: weighed down with supplies, the bundle in his arms gives her enough strength and determination that she’s actually able to greet him with a smile.

He does not return it.

He looks terrible, gasping for breath as he drops the bundle at her feet. Pale and drenched with sweat, and with a feverish gleam in his eyes, Sandy sorely wishes she could blame his raggedness on typical characteristic laziness; alas, she is too familiar with the signs of distress, and her survival instincts won’t allow her the peace of that delusion.

There’s a rattling in his breath that she recognises far too well, a gasp on each inhale and a groan on each exhale that speaks of a bad and possibly-dangerous sort of pain.

Sandy, being intimately acquainted with injuries of all sorts, raises a brow. “Are you—”

“Dug up our weapons,” he interrupts; it speaks volumes, she thinks, that he doesn’t let her ask the question, and his evasion makes her all the more uneasy. “Salvaged what I could from what’s left of the demons’ food stores. And water, of course.” He tosses the skin back at her, half-full now. “There’s a little trickle or something coming out through a hole in the wall. Figured you could take a gander at it, maybe see if there’s enough to...”

He pauses, biting down on his lip. Judging by his tight jaw and nervous swallowing, Sandy can tell he’s hoping she’ll do more than simply find the source and use it to soothe their parched throats.

“You want me to try and break through the rest of the rock,” she guesses, feeling her own jaw clench. “Use the water pressure to punch a way out of here.” He doesn’t reply, and his silence is all the answer she needs. “ _No_.”

He throws up his hands. “Stop being so bloody stubborn! Would you rather we both suffocate down here?”

He’s definitely more breathless than he should be, she notes: the words come in fits and starts, like it’s an effort to get them out through his teeth. Declining to answer the question, Sandy studies him for a beat, trying to assess the severity of his condition, then purses her lips and empties the waterskin over her ruined, blood-soaked legs.

She has just enough time to wince at the wastefulness — never mind that there is apparently more dripping down the wall out there somewhere — and then the water hits the open wounds and all thought is gone. Her eyes roll back, she feels a a scream wrench out of her, and there’s nothing she can do but ride it out and try not to black out.

She slumps back when it’s over, when the waterskin is empty and her legs are soaked but clean.

“Good,” she croaks, voice quaking almost as hard as the rest of her. “Now give me your shirt.”

Pigsy is staring fixedly at the floor, but the command jolts him to attention. “Beg your pardon?”

“Your shirt.” She closes her eyes, waving impatiently at the tatters of her own clothing, the shredded, useless folds of her cloak. “Need to bind it. Need fabric. You’ve got plenty. So hand it over.”

She’s slurring rather badly, the pain making her tongue even clumsier than usual, but she gets the distinct impression it’s not just the incoherence that makes him hesitate and clear his throat.

“Uh.” He frowns down at himself, blanching like she just asked him to strip down completely naked. “Are you—”

“Yes.” She squints up at him, trying to pierce his expression, but all she finds is prudish self-consciousness and discomfort. “This is not the time for standing on ceremony, Pigsy. So if you’d kindly save your blushes for a more appropriate moment...” A breath as he continues to hesitate; she sighs, swallows, and adds, “Please?”

That gets through to him. His features twist unhappily, broadcasting his reluctance, but he sucks it up this time and complies.

She knows what to expect. Even if he wasn’t giving it away with his hesitation and his fumbling, she can see the effort it takes him to shrug out of his overshirt, the effort it takes him to move at all. She knows that he’s hurt, she knows that he’s been trying to hide it, and it doesn’t surprise her one bit when he struggles out of the garment and reveals a blooming labyrinth of black-purple bruises.

“You’re injured,” she observes, as toneless as she can while her voice and body are still so wobbly. “Your ribs?”

His grimace confirms it. “Nothing serious. Don’t worry about it.”

But she does. She’s heard the rattling in his breath, seen the exertion of labour where even he would usually have little trouble. He forgets, in his swiftness to dismiss his pain, that Sandy is not like Monkey or Tripitaka, raised safe and comfortable within the walls of a palace or a monastery, that she has spent her entire life in survival mode, that she has suffered and hurt and bled for the right to stay alive.

There are few injuries a god can endure she has not felt at some point or another, and fewer she’s not inflicted on others.

“Broken,” she guesses, though of course it’s not really a guess at all. “You shouldn’t be moving. You might make it worse.”

“Yeah, well...” He tries to shrug it off, only to blanch more when the motion aggravates his chest. “It’s not like we have much of a choice, now, is it? Can’t stick around here and wait for the rest of the place to come down. Dead for sure that way. So, you know, I reckon I’ll take my chances.”

A good point. Sandy resents him for that, just a little bit.

She binds her right leg quickly, the left with greater care, as best she can with strips torn from his shirt. It’s good fabric, soft and breathable, and it wraps well; she wonders if the thought ever occurred to him that he was wearing the perfect bandage material on his back. She wonders, rather less generously, if he’s ever had any reason to need it.

She’s never been able to imagine him in her place. He, well-fed and well-rested, soft and lazy, dying as she almost did more times than she can count, in a sewer or a cold dark alley, delirious with pain or sickness, holding his broken body together with his hands for want a tourniquet, his own blood dark and cold and wet against his palms, the terror, the desperation, the pain—

She pulls the binding as tight as she can, clenching her teeth. The memory is far more painful than the task, and she feels much better when it’s done. Illusive, probably, but even so.

Pigsy is gazing mournfully at the remains of his shirt, so Sandy attempts to comfort him with a weak, shaky-sounding, “Thank you.”

He grunts, turning away. “All good?”

“Yes.” She exhales slowly, adjusts to the new, clean pressure around her legs, then hauls herself upright. “How bad is your breathing?”

His cough is pained, and embarrassed. “I told you, it’s nothing—”

“Don’t lie to me.” The outburst may not be enough to cut him off, but the glare that goes with it certainly does the job. “If we are to survive out there for long enough to reunite with the others — to say nothing of digging our way out of here in the first place — I need to know exactly what we’re dealing with.” She crosses her arms, as best she can while unsteadily seated. “So I will ask you again: how bad is your breathing?”

He studies her for a long beat, as though trying to figure out how much he can get away with, then he deflates with a heavy, rough-sounding sigh.

“Believe it or not,” he says wearily, “I’ve had worse.”

Sandy does not believe it. “Really? In Locke’s palace, surrounded by feather pillows?”

She doesn’t expect him to rise to that, and he doesn’t.

“It’ll be fine,” he insists instead, with all the conviction of a cock-eyed optimist. “So long as I don’t make too many sudden movements. You know, like having to dig myself out of a collapsed prison and then run for my life to escape my former demon allies. That sort of thing.” He musters a grin, wry and very ill-advised. “Well, I guess we’re pretty safe from that last part, at least for now. Demons are all dead and gone, thanks to you.”

Sandy supposes she should take some satisfaction at that. She got what she wanted: an end to their twisted enterprise. She’s not sure why she doesn’t feel more vindicated.

Too much pain, perhaps, and she is much too tired.

“They deserved a much more painful fate than I gave them,” she says, feeling empty.

Pigsy blanches a little at that. “More painful than being drowned and crushed?”

“Yes.” Said without hesitation, or remorse. “How many gods were tortured at their hands? How many choked to death on their drugs, or hallucinated until they went mad? How many died in their cells, of starvation or dehydration, suffocation or claustrophobia? How many did they forget about and leave to rot, alone and powerless in the dark?” Her voice is rising, passion making her pitchy. “Do you even know?”

Again, no answer. Naive of her to expect he’s changed enough to offer one.

Instead, he coughs, sucks in his breath, and deflects to her mangled left leg.

“Are you really going to try and stand on that?”

Sandy shrugs. “As you said,” she points out, “we have little choice. We can’t stay down here forever. And you’re clearly in no condition to try and carry me.”

 _Or anything else,_ she thinks privately, and tells herself she’s not worried.

Perhaps it’s for the best, then, that he’s managed to salvage so very little.

She blocks out that discomfort, and focuses all her strength on the other, the more immediate, the more—

 _Painful_.

Which it is. Torturous, terrible, traumatic—

But then, of course, she knew it would be.

And she is long accustomed to that particular kind of pain, the kind that is all physical, blood and bone and raw flesh. She is used to the misery juddering and jolting through her body, growing worse and worse with each movement, each breath, each thought. She is used to adjusting and adapting, keeping sharp every nerve and muscle, anticipating, bracing, feeling the impact before it hits.

She’s used to being injured. Not like this, perhaps, but close enough that the almost-blackout as she lurches upright is familiar and easily thwarted. She is used to this, yes, and used to enduring it with none of the benefits she has now: a friend — no, a companion — at her side, a destination fixed in her mind with other companions — no, friends — waiting. A quest, a purpose, a reason to try, to live, to want to push through the worst of it.

She is not fleeing for her life on a shattered ankle or a broken hip. She is not gasping or choking, struggling to keep her breath in bruised, battered lungs. She is not holding her insides in, hoping the blood won’t illuminate her trail and give her away to those who would happily finish the job. She’s just here, hauling herself upright, standing and making her body ready to return to her new friends.

To Tripitaka, the little monk with the big heart, whose name sustained her through the worst of the old hurts. Tripitaka, who was for so long nothing more than an idea, a phantom of a thought, a shadow-cloaked vision that frequented her fever dreams. Tripitaka, who gave her life meaning before she ever met him.

To Tripitaka, yes, and to the Monkey King too, whose return was prophesised long before she was born, who is broody and arrogant, who thinks himself above everyone and her most of all. Monkey, who hates her for being so far from his definition of a god, who resents her for being weaker than him, who is disgusted by the sight of her. Monkey, who despite all of that would gladly, readily, eagerly fight by her side.

Her friends.

And perhaps, one day, Pigsy as well.

One day very, very far from this one.

If she can shut off the part of her mind that hates and fears him, if she can silence the memories of why. She only knows his touch as a distant, remote sort of echo, but it set into motion so much suffering she still feels it every day, more keenly than she should. She can’t look at him without shuddering, can’t hear his voice without remembering how it grew cold, can’t look into his eyes without remembering how they did too.

She wonders if she will ever be able to share his space without flinching or baring her teeth. She wonders if there will ever come a time, months or years or centuries down the line, where she can look back on what she was and not feel that awful noose tightening around her throat. She wonders if she’ll always wear it, that necklace made from others’ threats, others’ hate, other’s violence, if she will ever be able to cast it off for good.

She hopes so. She never wanted to be like this. Even when it was happening, she never wanted to feel—

But she’s beginning to understand now, what Tripitaka was talking about when he asked her about unpleasant associations with touch, when he saw — despite her best efforts to hide it — that her wayward, wandering feelings were a problem. He asked if she was wounded or traumatised, if that was something they’d need to ‘work through’, and of course she’d told him no... but now she’s not so sure.

She knows that it hurts to remember.

She thinks maybe that’s the only thing she does know.

She thinks—

“Hey.”

Pigsy’s voice pulls her back. Back to the present, to a lighter kind of darkness and a hurt that is much more immediate, to the blinding bolts of agony arcing up and down her leg as she struggles to stay standing.

“What is it?” she demands, and for once the belligerence in her voice comes from pain and not anger.

If he’s upset by her tone, he doesn’t show it. No doubt he’s starting to understand himself the effects of pain on the mind, because his features soften into a warmth so sweet that Sandy is sure it will make her ill.

“Thought you’d want these back,” he says, and holds out her weapons like the lifelines he must know they are.

Sandy doesn’t want him to know how much better she feels, simply by having them in hand. Slipping the little knife back into her belt, feeling the tug as it settles at her hip. Planting her scythe in the ground, feeling its solid surface, comfortable and familiar against her palms, basking in the gleam as its keen edge finds the light and holds it like the most precious gift.

It doesn’t hurt either, she supposes, that it also provides her with a useful crutch.

Pigsy watches her lean on it, no doubt seeing some of the relief colour her face as she lifts some of the weight off her screaming left leg. He chews on his lip for a moment, as if stuck in some deep, troubling thought, then sighs and, with an obvious force of will, holds out his rake.

“Not like I’m going to get any use out of the thing in this state,” he remarks, as if to cushion the blow of separation for himself. “Someone might as well, eh?”

Sandy stares at the weapon, then at its master. It’s a far deeper gesture, she knows, than simply giving her a second crutch. He’s offering to hand over his weapon, the only means he has of defending himself, whether against demons or against her. More, he is handing over its power; looking at it, Sandy can sense the crackle and hum of lightning on the air, the threat of violence that could put even the wrath of the seas to shame.

He is giving her all of that, and leaving himself vulnerable without it.

He’s telling her, without the need for clumsy words, that he trusts her.

A stupid thing to do. And dangerous, given her present state of mind.

Sandy shakes her head.

“Keep it,” she says. “Lightning and water don’t mix well.”

That amuses him. Really and genuinely, she thinks, going by the way he laughs and then immediately regrets it. One hand pressed to his bruise-blackened ribs, the other squeezing the haft of his rake, arrhythmic and a little bit desperate; whether it’s any use to him or not, she can tell that a part of him needs its closeness just as surely as she needs her scythe. They make them, those weapons, for good or for ill; without them, they are diminished.

He coughs, recovering himself a little, then musters a shaky nod.

“Okay,” he concedes, studying her scythe. “Yeah. Decent point.”

Sandy nods too, then turns away from him.

Not avoidance, for once; she needs to focus, to hold her balance and listen to the commands of her body. She’s been here before, badly hurt but needing to stay upright, to keep going, to move forward lest she stop for too long and not be able to start again. Dehydration, open wounds and heat sickness are much kinder enemies than demons and gods and human-skinned monsters, and it feels almost like a luxury to be able to steady herself, to look around and take in her surroundings, to feel her resolve grow strong.

Even against the weakness of her body.

Her right leg hurts. Her left leg screams.

But she is still standing.

She draws in her breath. Lets it out slowly, counting her heartbeats, feeling them slow and grow even. Then, when she is as steady as she can hope to be, she turns back to Pigsy.

“All right,” she says. “Show me where the water is.”

*


	8. Chapter 8

*

Pigsy is right about the water.

There is a thin trickle, small but steady, dripping out through a fissure in the wall. Sandy can sense a fair amount more behind the surface, enough to fill their lone waterskin a dozen times or more. Enough to keep them hydrated until they reach Tripitaka, and perhaps longer still, though she knows that’s not what Pigsy is hoping to get out of it.

He’s right about that too, she concedes grimly. They only have one waterskin; what good would it do anyone to empty and refill it a dozen times, here in this place they can’t bring with them?

So she fills the skin once, drains it dry to slake her screeching thirst, then fills it again and orders Pigsy to drink as well. No room for discussion or debate, and this time he doesn’t try; he drinks deeply, sighs shallowly, then hands the thing back without a word.

Trusting her to do whatever she thinks is best.

The thought makes Sandy feel a little bit sick. More so than she’s feeling already, even, with the throbbing in her leg providing a constant source of nausea and vertigo. That he can trust her so easily and so completely, when just a short while ago she was thinking about pulling his ribs apart, taking his life into her hands, letting him suffer just to see him feel it, just to give him a taste of what he put her through for all those years, all those long and endless—

Behind the wall, a low rumble warns her of her wandering emotions.

Sandy sighs, slows her breathing, forces herself back under control.

“You know this is a dangerous idea,” she says to Pigsy, hoping her voice sounds more steady than her insides feel. “You know I could lose control again. Bury us both, for good this time. Worse, maybe.”

She could also strain her powers to their limits and not achieve anything at all, of course, as she did with Monkey in Locke’s prison. But that would do them no harm, and so she keeps it to herself.

Pigsy studies her for a beat, then exhales tightly. “I know,” he says, rather more kindly than she probably deserves. “But what are the odds, really? Even bloody idiots like us get lucky once in a while.”

It makes sense, Sandy muses bitterly, that he would think that way. Doesn’t he land on his feet often enough?

But she never has. Her whole life has been one misfortune after another, accidents and losses of control and failures, failures failures, each one leading to a new world of loss and pain and heartbreak. Some her own fault, many not; experience has taught her more times than she can count that she is not and probably will never be ‘lucky’.

Pigsy may trust her, imbecile that is he, imagining that he has nothing left to lose. But Sandy knows better, and she certainly doesn’t trust herself.

She turns to look at him. Really look at him, as closely and deeply as she can without feeling those old pains rearing up again. The lines of exhaustion on his face, the strain and discomfort he tries — valiantly but futilely — to keep hidden, the parts of himself that have clearly never suffered prolonged pain and don’t know how to endure it now, the places where his softness shows through the hard lines of his jaw and knuckles.

All of it she studies, all of it she absorbs with a detached indifference. No empathy, no compassion, only the vague, distant awareness that she maybe doesn’t want to have to bury him again.

And even that she’s not entirely sure of.

“Are you positive there’s no other way through?” she asks, drawing back at last and letting herself breathe. “No weak points in the rock? No gaps we can force wider or climb out through?”

He stares at her like he thinks she’s lost her mind.

“Oh, I’m sure there’s some hole or crack out there somewhere,” he shrugs, with that maddening carelessness he loves so well. “But neither of us is in any shape to climb or dig or do whatever else, are we? Your leg is shot to hell, and I’m...” He breaks off, clearly still unwilling to admit the obvious: that his ribs are in bad shape and so is the rest of him. “So what does it matter if there’s some other way, if you can pull this off and spare us more bloody pain?”

Sandy scowls. “Because if I can’t, we’ll both likely die.”

“Fair point.” Another shrug, like his definition of a ‘fair point’ is just one more annoyance to be tossed over his shoulder. “But I’m willing to take that bet if you are.”

“Your life?” She stares at him, piercing his eyes for any sign of deception, of falsehood, of lies. It baffles her that she finds none, only weariness and a mirror of the faith he claims so effortlessly. “Really? Even with my current track record, you’d trust me not to...”

She doesn’t finish. His eyes, already soft with his quiet truth, soften all the more.

He reaches out automatically, stopping himself just a fraction of a breath away from touching her shoulder. Sandy’s entire body seizes, ready to lash out or flinch or recoil, and it’s only the uselessness of her leg that stops her from doing one or more of those things even after he catches himself and pulls away.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, with sincerity, and shoves both his hands behind his back.

Sandy stays as she is, poised and paralysed, and it’s only after he retreats with the rest of him as well, inching back a good ten paces, that she is able to start her heart again, to swallow down the unwanted reflexes and untangle the knots inside her chest.

“You have to stop doing that,” she rasps, almost pleading with him. “I’ll kill you if you don’t. I’ll—”

“No, you won’t.” His conviction makes her angry again, makes her feel the water behind the wall start to grow rough as well. “Come on, now. We both know you would’ve done it long before now if you could have.”

She shakes her head, fervent and feeling feverish. “Untrue.”

It is only a fraction of what she wants to say, and less still of what she needs to. But their position here is precarious enough as it is, and the water behind the wall is already responding to her anger and her fear, to all the wild, violent parts of her that will bury them both if she doesn’t calm down. She can’t afford to talk about it here, can’t even afford to really think about it too much; she will most certainly kill him if she does, and probably herself as well.

“Look,” he says, with the infuriating patience of one talking to a small, stubborn child. “I’ll stay as far back as you want me to, okay? Right on the other side of the wreckage, even. Out of sight, out of mind, and out of reach.” His grin is watery, but earnest. “Out of the way, too. Sound good?”

Well. Perhaps not ‘good’, but it does sound better.

She’s not sure why it brings her comfort, exactly, but it does. Relief, maybe, that he won’t be within touching distance, and that she won’t be distracted by his face or his hands or his ribs while she’s trying to concentrate. But then, perhaps there’s a different kind of relief in there as well, the kind that loosens in her chest and makes it easier to breathe as she realises that it will keep him out of the blast radius.

Out of reach. Out of range. Out of—

Perhaps he had a point before, after all. If she really wanted him dead — indeed, if she even really wanted to do him serious harm — she’s had plenty of opportunities. Lost control enough times and made him suffer for it: a blade at his neck, his arm pulled almost — but only _almost_ — out of its socket, a waterskin exploding in his face. A lot of nearly-damage, a lot of little moments, but...

Those things didn’t bring her pleasure or satisfaction. She never felt vindicated, even when she was spitting and snarling that he deserved it. She never felt good, only ashamed and full of self-loathing.

Perhaps that’s a sign of growth. Perhaps it—

She doesn’t let herself think about it.

She can’t afford to let herself think about it.

She closes her eyes, tries to silence her stupid wandering thoughts, to corral her feelings back into their cages. Focuses her mind as best she can, tries to catch an even rhythm with her breathing, readies herself for the task ahead, the task she does not want but he does, the task he has _faith_ —

“Go, then,” she croaks, cracking one eye open to glower at him. “I want you as far away from this wall as you can get. And I want you to stay there until I say you can move. Do you understand?”

His only answer is a grin and a thumbs-up, both of which Sandy ignores.

She turns to the wall, the fissure and the trickle of water, relieved to find it’s showing no signs of slowing. A moment to gauge the pressure behind the surface, to ensure there is enough left for the task at hand, then, satisfied that she can afford the loss, she fills their waterskin one last time, as full as she can get it without waste. 

“Be careful with it,” she says, throwing it over to Pigsy without really looking at him. “No spillage, and do not partake unless it’s absolutely necessary. All right?”

He grunts an unimpressed, “Yes, ma’am.”

Sandy ignores the bite of sarcasm. It’s not a frivolous instruction, she knows, whether he has the stomach to accept that or not. That skin, and what little water she’s managed to squeeze into it, will probably be all they have until they reunite with the others. Let him complain all he likes, if he really wants to waste his strength that way, so long as he obeys.

Eyes closed again, focusing every iota of strength she has on the fissure and the water waiting beyond, she makes the attempt.

It is easier than she expects. Easier in part because there is less water, little enough that every droplet counts, that she is able to focus on each point and direct it where it needs to go. Easier, too, because there are no distractions this time, because Pigsy is far enough away that she almost can imagine he’s not there at all, because Tripitaka is not here either, so far out of reach that he might as well be on a different continent. It’s just her and the crack in the rock, her and the trickling water, her and the space between this dusty, debris-riddled underground and the world outside, the world she needs to escape to.

Tripitaka won’t rescue her from this prison; there will be no last-minute change of sides to break her out before the noose drops. She has no-one to depend on here, only herself. Only her powers, the same powers that kept her alive for all those years, the same powers that condemned her to suffer, marking her out as different, as wrong, as not human and not good. Her blessing and her curse, and often both at the same time.

A curse before, a blessing now.

The water heeds her command, moving in rhythm with the pain in her leg, the sweat beading on her brow, the strain of staying upright. It’s easier, she finds, to focus on the rhythm of blood and breath in her body, on what is physical and what is necessary. The water surges, a rumble and a roar muted only slightly by the rock wall; the pressure in Sandy’s head surges too, more and more until her skull feels ready to burst, until her instincts are shouting at her to scramble back, to get out of range, to—

The wall comes down, water tearing through the crack, explosive but controlled — _controlled_ , yes! — bringing with it a few hair-thin strands of sunlight.

More rocks above and beyond. More cracks to push through.

A long still way to go.

And this with an ever-diminishing supply of water. This with an ever-diminishing supply of strength as well, and with the pain in her leg reaching a new crescendo every time she has to readjust her balance.

No matter. She composes herself, squares her shoulders, and tries again.

And again.

And again.

It takes time. Lots of time, and almost all of the remaining water, but she does it: a final effort, and she breaks through almost all the way to the surface.

Far enough, at least, that it’s only the slightest struggle to clear away the last few bits of debris with her bare hands, shoving aside rocks the size of her torso — and one or two the size of Pigsy’s — in a delirious frenzy. She can feel the heat, can smell the sand, taste the dry, sun-touched air; it is so intoxicating, she barely hears Pigsy offering to help, barely hears her own response, tight-lipped and terse, ordering him to stay where he is.

No fear of doing him any damage this time; her powers are depleted and so is the water. She’s just worried that his closeness would shatter her concentration.

Not that it matters, really. After the exertion and focus needed to channel and control her powers for so long, what little remains of the task is almost like a reprieve. In just a few minutes, the last of the rocks fall away and their erstwhile prison floods with blazing white-yellow light.

Sandy blinks, dazed and dizzied. Delirious again, but this time only for a moment. Then she wets her lips, takes a well-earned gulp of fresh air, and staggers out into the sun.

“We’re through,” she hears her own voice gasp.

She’s not sure if she’s talking to Pigsy or just restating the fact for herself. She’s not really sure of anything; she is drained and spent, and the only thing that keeps her from dropping to her knees is the hazy realisation that the pain of impact would most definitely be the death of her.

Pigsy appears beside her, his rake poised like a barrier between them. He doesn’t offer it again like he did before, but it’s clear the option is there: if she needs the extra support, she need only reach out and take it. She doesn’t, but she appreciates the gesture more than she’ll ever say.

“You good?” he asks.

Sandy swallows. _No,_ she thinks, but she knows that she can’t afford to say so.

She’s already starting to feel parched and disoriented, dehydrated all over again after so much hard work. Like all the water she drank evaporated along with the stuff she used to break through the fallen rock. Like she never filled her belly at all, she feels like there’s nothing left inside her.

Weakened and wearied by the effort, dizzied by the lack of water, biting down on her tongue to keep from screaming as her ruined leg braces and braces in the slippery sand.

And him injured too. He who has never been forced to survive in his life, he who doesn’t know the first thing about how to stay alive in a situation like this. Sandy knows that her survival is tied with his: she needs to stop him from drinking all their water in one gulp, needs to stop him from devouring in a single meal what meagre food he salvaged from the demons’ stock.

Pigsy knows nothing of survival, and Sandy knows everything. If they are to survive long enough to see Tripitaka again, she has to be their compass.

No, she is not good.

But she has to be.

And so she will be.

She swallows again. Breathes in, breathes out, and plants her scythe in the sand. Turns, slowly and steadily, and locks her wild, feverish eyes on his.

“Yes,” she says, in a voice as cracked as the rock that failed to bury them. “I’m good.”

*

And so, together, they venture forth.

Back out into the barren lands, the scorching sun high overhead. Back out into the desert, limping and staggering towards the ever-distant horizon. Back to the sand and the dust, the dry air and the little razors in her throat, the silence in her head as she reaches and reaches for water that she knows isn’t there.

For all their misfortune inside that awful prison, she knwos that it was a stroke of luck to happen across a group of demons well-organised enough to stockpile food and water. They have supplies now, modest though they are, that they didn’t have before and couldn’t have obtained elsewhere.

Sandy has learned from experience, many, many times, to never count on finding such good fortune again.

And to take comfort in what few blessings they have.

One waterskin, whole and freshly filled, and a small stockpile of easily-carried foodstuffs liberated from the demons’ destroyed hoard. This to sustain the two of them, perhaps for days. Both injured, one uniquely susceptible to the lack of water and the other uniquely unaccustomed to suffering or deprivation of any kind.

It is hard going, and it’s only going to get harder.

This even without their injuries to contend with. The two of them alone, their shared past hanging over both their heads like a leaden weight, the threat of pain or violence, anger or fear, the pulse of instinct grinding like rusted wheels inside Sandy’s head, her bones, her veins. This every minute, every hour, every second she and Pigsy have been on the same side. This, even if they were both uninjured. 

The lack of resources, too, like a noose about their necks. The hardships of walking in the desert at all, this place of shifting sands and dust-clogged air, this place where each step is more arduous than the last, more difficult, more challenging, more—

More _painful_.

Because, yes, on top of all that, they _are_ injured. Both of them. Pigsy denies any danger from his broken ribs, but Sandy has heard the rattle in his breath and she knows better.

Both of them, then. She with barely one function leg, he with a time-bomb threatening to pierce his lungs at every inhalation. And pain. Pain, pain, pain which will not be forgotten.

Repressed, on occasion, with the right focus, but never forgotten.

It is agony to walk, even with her scythe as a crutch. Even for Sandy, who has walked and run many times on near-crippling injuries; she knows better than to pretend the pain doesn’t exist, but acknowledging it doesn’t lessen its power one bit. Her right leg is mostly functional, but her left is not, and the sand beneath her feet is constantly shifting and disarming them both; every other step becomes a fresh struggle to find purchase with her weapon, the only thing keeping her upright.

The ground refuses to hold still, and it will not support her weight. It doesn’t obey her orders, doesn’t heed her pleas, doesn’t even spare a moment’s pity for her tears. It is as merciless as a demon—

As merciless as a _human_.

Still, because she has no other choice, she holds all that inside and keeps her body moving.

Keeps his body moving, too. Pigsy, with his low endurance and his poor constitution, his rattling breath and his battered, broken ribs. Pigsy, who she knows is hurt worse than he wants her to believe.

He doesn’t complain; that’s telling in itself. She knows he wants to, can see the strain of it lining his face, but he holds it in check, seemingly to make it easier on her, and keeps his focus on the horizon.

When he starts lagging behind, whining and begging that they stop for lunch — conveniently ignoring the fact that the sun is well past its zenith — Sandy recognises the shift in him: it’s not borne of his usual laziness and insatiable appetites, not this time. For once the demand seems to come from a place of genuine necessity; he knows his limits, and he has reached them. Probably some time before speaking up, if the look on his face is any measure.

She allows it. Grudging, yes, but this she does understand.

By the time they find a place to stop, it’s all Pigsy can do to keep from collapsing completely. He flops to the ground, slumping sideways with his face in the sand, oblivious to the way the stuff sticks to his skin and his clothes, oblivious to everything, it seems, beyond his need to take the weight off his legs and just sit down.

Sandy watches him with thinned lips, upset and frustrated that she can’t allow herself the same luxury. Her leg hurts so badly she can barely even see straight, but she knows if she were to sit, even for a moment, she would never be able to get back up again.

The pain is relentless, almost maddening, but she stays standing because she has no other choice. 

While they’re stopped Pigsy takes some time to look over their supplies, what little food he managed to salvage from the wreck of the demons’ prison. Going by the look on his face, one might be inclined to believe they were at risk of starvation, but on closer inspection Sandy sees no shortage; in fact, the sight sets her mind rather more at ease. It’s mostly scraps and pieces, typical of salvage, but enough to feed a god for a week with a good amount to spare.

It’s decent salvage, too, the kind of food that will keep well over the coming days, assuming she can convince him to eat sparingly. Mostly strips of dried and salted meat, a few hard nuts and edible seeds and other such easily-stored packages, clearly selected for their hardiness and durability. As with their water stores, it seems that Pigsy’s demon friends kept a stockpile of food intended to last them for extended periods of time. It’s good, she thinks, really good.

Pigsy, however, looks so distressed he might as well have been asked to eat bark.

They have such unfathomably different views on survival, Sandy thinks tiredly.

“Should’ve dug up more,” he grouches. “Not even half a meal in this, let alone...”

Sandy resists the urge to hurt him. “Several days, at least,” she says, more generously than she’d like. “Longer, if you have the willpower to restrain your needless appetites.”

Rather less generously, he scowls. “Look,” he snaps. “We’re not all survival experts, you know? I never learned how to keep this hunk of junk running on nothing but scraps.”

He gestures at his body, partly self-deprecating and partly ashamed.

Sandy looks him up and down. A fair point, she concedes, but doesn’t soften. She can’t afford to, and his excuses, while perhaps valid, won’t get them through the wasteland.

“Perhaps, then,” she says tightly, “this will be a good learning experience.” She holds out a hand, the one not clinging to her scythe for dear life, and he grudgingly hands over the little bundle of food. “We have to eat sparingly while we’re out here, or we won’t survive. Your body needs to learn the difference between what it wants and what it needs. Only what you absolutely need to keep going, and not a bite more. Understand?”

He growls, unhappy but acceptant. “Sure, boss.”

Still, even with that acceptance, the glare her shoots her when she hands over a single strip of dried meat would have probably killed a less durable god.

Sandy bundles up the remaining supplies and tucks them into her belt for safe keeping. Out of his reach and easily within hers: a double victory. She would no sooner trust Pigsy with their food supplies than she would trust Monkey with a mirror.

She pretends not to notice the way he’s staring at her. Pretends not to notice the thoughtful, deliberate way he’s chewing on his tiny meal, the way every move seems like an assessment, like he’s passing judgement on her stillness, on the way she’s still standing, the way she won’t speak to him or let him eat more than he needs, the way she—

“Not hungry?”

She frowns. Surprised he noticed, though she supposes she shouldn’t be; if there’s one thing Pigsy never fails to see, it’s food or the lack thereof.

He’s trying to be casual about it, though. Sandy’s not really sure why; he must surely realise there’s no point in playing that angle with her. In any case, he’s terrible at it: his voice is strained and laboured, the words muffled by his full mouth and the effort it takes to get them out. He’s never had much talent for subtlety even when he’s in peak health, and now the effort is positively laughable.

“Eat your lunch,” she says, not answering the question. “So we can get moving again.”

He does eat, but that doesn’t stop him from pressing her. “You need your strength too.”

True enough; she does. But the strength she needs isn’t going to come from a meal she knows wouldn’t stay down. Her leg is hurting too badly, the relentless throb-throb-throb of pain tearing through her like the teeth of some wild animal, dug in so deep it will rip her to pieces before it lets go. Even the act of standing still feels like the most impossible task, each shift of the sand sending bursts of agony up through the raw, bloody flesh, making her so nauseous she can barely even open her mouth to speak.

“I’ll be fine,” she insists, clenching her teeth and hoping he’ll get the message.

If he does, he ignores it. He sighs, tears off one final bite for himself, then offers her the rest, turning his face away like he can’t bear the horror of giving away his food.

“If it’s the ‘need to eat sparingly’ thing that’s bugging you,” he says, “just take mine.”

It is a calculated gesture, and a very clever one. He knows that she’ll recognise it for what it is — an act of immeasurable kindness from one so unaccustomed to such things, to give away the one thing in the world he wants so badly to keep for himself — and he has the measure of her well enough by now to wager she won’t have the heart to refuse.

He’s not entirely wrong. She doesn’t accept the offering, but she does offer in return the gift of her honesty.

It is no less generous than his, though she doubts he’ll realise that.

“I know my body,” she explains, choosing her words very carefully. “Right now, it would reject anything I tried to eat. It would be a waste of our already-limited resources.”

He blinks. Surprised by the revelation, perhaps, or more likely at the fact that she’s willing to let him hear it. Understandable, she supposes; she’s been far from forthcoming with him until now, unwilling to expose herself, to be vulnerable or weakened in front of the god who once stripped her of so much of her identity.

It is a horror all its own, the thought of trusting him with her weaknesses, especially one as critical as this, but she can’t expect him to obey her without offering a little bit of the same in return. If they’re going to survive this ordeal long enough to find the others they have to work as a unit, and that means finding common ground.

It is a hard thing to put into practice, but it is the right thing to do. She will swallow her pride, her pain, her fear, and do what must be done. Survival is not limited to keeping herself alive here: she must think of them both.

Still, she turns away as soon as she’s got the words out, unable to bear the thought that he might still be watching her, assessing, gauging, judging.

There are none of those things in his voice when he speaks, though. Only quiet compassion, and the particular breed of kindness that makes her stomach turn and her heart stop, that makes her think of Tripitaka and want to hide.

“That bad, huh? The pain?”

“Bearable,” she lies. A lie for his sake, because she knows he could not endure the truth, and for her own, to try and convince her wayward mind that it is true. “But I can’t stave off that and the nausea at the same time. Better if my stomach stays empty until I can sit down first and lessen the pain.”

She speaks steadily, with a familiarity born from years and years of experience; he seems to take note of that, as well he should.

“Sounds like you’ve done this sort of thing before.”

He says it without inflection, but she still flinches and bites down on a snarl. Anger threatens to rise in her chest, but she swallows it down. She can no more afford to indulge her roiling emotions than she can afford to eat: both, she knows, would end the same way.

“You know I have.” She shields her face, scouring the horizon for their absent friends. “You incited it.”

Pigsy’s sigh is as exhausting as it is exhausted, but he holds his tongue and says nothing. No attempt to defend himself, no apology, not even an acknowledgement that she speaks the truth. Only silence, and the awful rattling of his ribs, a reminder to them both he is not as unaffected by this ordeal as he pretends to be.

Sandy tries not to let the silence weigh on her. Is he really so disconnected, she wonders, that he can no longer see the part he played in what she became? Or is that he does see and realises there is no apology great enough to undo the damage he’s done?

Is his vision so poor, or so clear? It makes a difference.

She doesn’t know which would bring her more succour, or if either option would bring her any at all. She doesn’t really know what she wants at all, or what she needs.

She only knows that his silence, this latest of so many, makes her insides burn. It spreads through her veins, pouring itself through her until it’s all she can see and all she can feel: the familiar heat of anger, of frustration, of all the little and big hurts he’s left to fester inside of her, god-sized fingerprints sticky with blood. Sometimes she can’t even breathe past the pain they left behind.

And he won’t even acknowledge that they’re there.

It makes her see red again, and black, and the dangerous swirl of the two of them together. It makes her want to lash out, never mind that she can barely stand, makes her want to throw herself at him and put her hands on his throat, squeeze until his larynx is as bruised and battered as his ribs, until he couldn’t apologise even if he tried, until he’s choking, until he’s gasping, until he can’t—

She closes her eyes, swallowing back a different sort of nausea.

“We should move,” she grits out. “Finish your lunch, and let’s go.”

More silence from him: no arguments, no complaints.

Afraid to turn back and look at him, for fear of what she’ll do if she sees his face, Sandy listens instead, to the smack of his lips as he chews and swallows, the dissatisfied sigh as he finishes, and then at last the grunts of exertion as he heaves his body back up onto its feet. No complaints there, either; he masks his discomfort surprisingly well. If Sandy didn’t know to listen for it, she wouldn’t notice the rasp of his breathing at all.

She should probably give him some credit for that.

Won’t. But should.

“All right,” he says, when the noise of his effort has finally died down. Sandy turns back, finds him standing beside her, holding out his rake once again. “You good to walk?”

She looks at the rake, the offer of support, of companionship, of help. She looks at his face, streaked with sweat and sand, lined with exhaustion and well-concealed pain.

He is trying. Just as Tripitaka keeps telling her, he really is trying. To look out for her, to support her, to be there for her, to offer what she needs even as he knows she would never accept it from him. He is _trying_ —

Sandy shoves the rake aside, knocking him off-balance.

“Of course,” she snaps, gripping her scythe so tightly it hurts. A gentler pain than the agony tearing through her leg, it grounds her and helps her to focus on the endless path ahead. “Keep up, or stay out of my way.”

And she storms off, limping towards the horizon as fast as her screaming, miserable body can carry her.

*

So it goes, onwards and onwards, for the rest of the day.

It is a simple enough task. Follow the arc of the sun, map out the easiest, most straightforward path to the distant horizon, the promise of an end to the wasteland, of fresh water and Tripitaka’s smile. Sandy’s memory is a patchwork thing even on her good days, but she knows their planned route well enough to follow it now, even while hurting and suffering from dehydration. She has spent half her life waiting for Tripitaka; it is no challenge at all now, to find her way back to his side.

Pigsy follows, dutiful and obedient, speaking only when he has something helpful to say. She can tell he’s dubious, but for once he keeps his opinions and his pessimism to himself. If it were Monkey here in her place, Sandy has no doubt Pigsy would be more than happy to share whatever less-than-flattering thoughts came into his head — “Are you _sure_ you know where you’re going?” or some other such mindlessness — but not with her. At least, not for now.

Ostensibly for her sake, though she suspects there’s a small measure of self-preservation too. Her temper is frayed, more and more with each agonising step, and neither one of them is stupid enough to trust that she’ll keep it under control if he says the wrong thing in the wrong moment.

When he does speak, rarely, it is carefully and gently, to make sure she’s well. Invasive, Sandy thinks, but a point of common sense just the same; he needs to know her condition as much as she needs to know his, and it is in both their best interests when he checks up on her when she stumbles, or asks if she’s all right when the pain becomes too great to keep her moans and curses from bubbling to the surface.

She reassures him as best she can, trying to see herself from his perspective: his only guide in this unending wasteland, the only one of them who really knows how to survive, probably the only one who has any idea where they’re going. She imagines he must be deeply afraid for his own skin; if she should drop dead from her injuries or lack of water, he would no doubt soon follow suit.

Sandy can survive almost anything. Unspeakable pain and sickness, extremes of heat and cold and weather, lack of sustenance or shelter or strength. Even the dehydration, as unpleasant as it is for a god with her particular talents, is far from insurmountable. She has lived with misery her whole life, and there is little here that she has not endured before, often for days, weeks, months at a time.

Pigsy is not quite so fortunate.

Or perhaps not so _un_ fortunate.

Fitting, she supposes. How well he prepared her for this, and how poorly he prepared himself.

If Sandy were the kind to take comfort in karmic retribution, she might find some satisfaction in the rattle of his breath, the low gasps and groans when he over-exerts himself, the way he fails to keep his body entirely upright as he staggers and stumbles and struggles to keep up.

She is hardly setting a feverish pace.

It should bring her a vindictive pleasure, that even crippled and unable to walk she outpaces him at each step. It should make her feel proud, that he is floundering, faltering, failing where she is not. It should make her feel superior, knowing that he wouldn’t stand a chance out here alone, that the only thing keeping him in one piece right now are the survival skills he forced down her throat for all those years.

But she feels none of those things.

She feels—

She doesn’t know what she feels.

She only knows that there is no comfort to be gleaned from his misery, no satisfaction from his rasping, laboured breaths, no pride from the way he’s slowing them both down.

His suffering is pain for them both, she tells herself.

That is why she lets him rest whenever he asks for it, why she doesn’t criticise or insult him, why she allows the precious daylight to drift away bit by bit while he bends with his hands on his knees and fails to draw breath into his battered lungs.

She doesn’t let him see how much pain it causes her, every time they stop. She doesn’t let him see—

She doesn’t let herself think about it either.

Just as she can’t afford to sit or lie down, afraid that she won’t be able to stand up again, she knows that opening the floodgates will cause her to drown; she cannot afford to feel too much, to think too deeply, to focus on anything but the motion and the momentum driving her body forward. She will acknowledge the pain when they stop for the night, when she has all the dark, cold hours to ride out the weakness in peace and quiet, when she can let the pain wash over her and use it to make herself strong again.

When there is no penalty for indulging such things. When she is hidden, veiled by the moon and blanketed by the clouds, when she is as much alone as she will ever be, when Pigsy—

When Pigsy is asleep, dreaming deeply, and unable to hear her cries.

They travel until the sun is almost completely down, and only stop for the night because Sandy doesn’t trust herself to navigate the endless desert by moonlight.

A strange reversal, and one that sits uncomfortably in her stomach: back in Palawa, she never left her sewer while the sun was up. Daylight was danger, was death, was despair. Daylight was her enemy and the shroud of night her friend; now, out here, the darkness that once kept her safe has become the threat and the daylight that blinds her and makes her vulnerable is her compass and map.

Perhaps this quest has changed her already, more than she thought. Made her a creature of daylight, a creature who lives and breathes under the sun, who basks in warmth and light and other such strange and confusing things.

It is hard to think of the daylight hours as a friend. Harder still to watch the moon begin to rise over that still-distant horizon and think, _danger_.

So much of her old life is gone, she thinks, transformed into something she doesn’t recognise, frightening and full of promise all at once. One day, perhaps, she’ll allow her mind and her body to catch up and transform as well.

She shares none of these thoughts with Pigsy. She’s not sure if she would even share them with Tripitaka, if he were here instead. Experience has taught her that there are things inside of her that others will never understand.

So she saves her breath, points to a cluster of not-too-distant rocks, and announces, “They should provide good shelter for the night.”

Pigsy’s relief is a comical thing. Would be, at least, if Sandy understood the first thing about comedy. He falls to his knees, babbling delirious praises to mythical beings they both know don’t exist, raising his arms to the heavens like the sky itself has granted him the reprieve.

Sandy, unimpressed, keeps moving.

The rocks do indeed provide a good shelter. This she suspects will be a blessing in the dark, icy hours to come: a desert is no pleasant place to spend the night exposed.

Sandy herself has little to fear from the cold — even the wasteland winds, biting and vicious as they are, count for little compared to the sewers in midwinter — but Pigsy is already beginning to shiver and the sun hasn’t even fully set. It will be a long, miserable night for him, she can tell, never mind the padding of his well-insulated body, never mind that a lifetime of eating his own weight at every meal should have left him well prepared to suffer far greater cold than a night or two in the barren lands.

He, bulky and well-fed, his massive size an obvious advantage, shivers and trembles like he’s never lived a day beyond the summer. She, scrawny and skinny and half-starved, barely feels the descending chill at all.

It is a near-impossible task, to swallow down the bitter taste that floods her mouth.

Sitting down with his back pressed against one of the larger and sturdier rocks, Pigsy cuts into her thoughts with a loud, self-pitying moan. Apparently the quiet restraint is a gift only granted when they’re in motion.

“Please tell me I’m allowed a half-decent supper,” he whines dramatically.

Sandy tosses another of the salted meat sticks at him.

“Make it last,” she says, without compassion. “Eat slowly, for a change, and perhaps your stomach will imagine itself filled.”

He sighs. “Bloody slave-driver, you are.”

There are many things she could say in response to that, if she wished to.

She could, for example, remark on the absurdity of it, he who built a palace off the backs of others, having any claim to being driven. She could point out that he knows nothing of servitude, or of suffering of any kind. She could inform him that it is his softness, the luxuriant life he lived so well that made him this way, not her too-keen grasp of what it takes to survive. She could remind him that her efforts here are in service to both of them, that he would be dead in a matter of hours if left to his own devices, that she is trying — truly, sincerely, and against all her own personal instincts — to keep him from killing himself with his laziness, greed, and stupidity.

She says none of those things. Why waste what little breath she has?

“You’re very lucky,” she says instead, “that I came to bring you back.”

Pigsy acknowledges this with a grunt.

“I know,” he says, swallowing only to fill his mouth again. He chews slowly, as she told him too, looking uncharacteristically pensive. Sandy wonders if he’s thinking of his former ‘business partners’, the demon sentinels drowned or buried under the wreckage of their stronghold. “Lucky we’re on the same side, too. I know you would’ve taken me out with the rest of them if you thought for a second I’d really turned.”

“I would have,” Sandy agrees. “Sometimes I...”

But she can’t say that. Not to his face. Of all the cold, hateful truths he deserves to hear...

Not that. Not even he deserves to hear that one.

That she sometimes thinks about doing it anyway. That sometimes it’s the only thing she can think about. 

Drowning him with water she doesn’t have, or strangling him with her bare hands, or burying her scythe between his broken ribs. A thousand violent visions playing out over and over again inside her head, and she hates herself for seeing them almost more than she hates him for being the reason they exist in the first place.

Because she should be better now. Because they are on the same side, because he has proven himself loyal and faithful, trusting and worthy of her trust in return. 

All of those things are true. All of those things she feels deep down in her bones, and sees reflected in his weary, pain-touched eyes. All of those things she knows.

But still it’s not enough. 

Still the visions fill her head, still the violent urges dig in their claws. To hurt him, to suffocate or smother or strangle him, to punch his already-broken ribs until there’s nothing left of them, until he really can’t breathe, until he learns, over and over and over, what real pain is, until he—

She turns her face up to the sky, drowns the visions in the cloudless orange-pink-red of sunset. Blocks it out because she has to, because he is no longer the monster who deserves those things and she is no longer the monster who would do them.

She tells herself they’ve both changed. He is weak out here, and she is strong. She has the knowledge and experience that will save them both, the determination and the fortitude and the understanding of what it means to survive. He has nothing but two working legs.

Everything he did to her, everything he made her, it wasn’t enough to break her. All those years he held her life in his hands, squeezing a little tighter every day just because he could, and now she’s the one holding his. Out here in the barren lands where she should be at her weakest, it is her hands that hold his life, weak and vulnerable and helpless.

Without her knowledge, her strength, her ability to survive... without all those hellish things he carved out of her for all those years, he would most certainly die out here.

He is dependant on her, completely and entirely.

He will survive because she will keep him alive.

For now, that is enough.

She takes a deep breath, banishes the dark thoughts, and braces herself for the awful task of sitting down.

“Care for a hand?” he asks, already knowing the answer. “I mean, uh, my rake’s over there if you need...”

He trails off, floundering. Teeth clenched, shuddering all the way down to her bones, Sandy ignores him.

It is exactly as excruciating as she knew it would be, manoeuvring her miserable body into a seated position. Her leg screams the whole time, even the slightest, most careful movement tearing through her like the flesh is being stripped from the bone, and she is so stiff and tense that the rest of her body is not much more cooperative. It takes minutes, long and agonising, to get herself down, and when she finally gets there, panting and leaning all her weight against one of the rocks, she feels almost ready to pass out.

Pigsy makes no comment, blessedly, but he does throw the waterskin at her. He doesn’t speak, but his eyes are dark with warning: _no arguments this time, you hear me?_

Sandy does hear, and she doesn’t argue. Couldn’t, even if she had a mind to; her throat, parched and razed raw, has long since closed up, leaving her speechless. If she wants to snap at him — which she does, rather more than she wants the world to stop spinning — she will need to rehydrate herself first.

She drink sparingly, though, allowing herself only a couple of scanty sips before surrendering the thing again, sliding it back to him with a pointed look.

“Two mouthfuls,” she orders, hoarse and shaky despite the refreshment. “No more.”

He doesn’t protest either, not that she’d expected him to. He does, however, manage to drain almost half of what they had left. Apparently his definition of a ‘mouthful’ is markedly different from her own.

Her fault, most likely. She should have assumed as much, from one who has never needed to think about waste or what it means. Should have taken his life into account and only allowed him a single gulp.

Nothing to be done about it now. She watches the water disappear down his ungrateful throat, watches him grimace with his usual self-pity, like even that excess was too little to satisfy him. It makes her angry again, and thankful that she can’t move, lest her reason be overpowered by her seething emotions and her own raging thirst.

Once again it seems that she must suffer more so he may suffer less.

She closes her eyes. Blocks out his grunts and groans and sighs, blocks out the shuffling as he tries to find a comfortable position. Focuses instead on her ravaged leg, the ragged throb of muscle and flesh, nerve and bone and shredded skin. She’ll need to examine it more thoroughly soon, to check that the walking hasn’t caused any more damage, but for now she only has strength enough to try and divide her mind from the pain.

If she is to make it through the night and still be able to walk again tomorrow, she needs to shut it off. She needs to eat something, needs to at least try to sleep, needs to be able to think and move and breathe without her vision going black and red and—

She needs it to stop. That’s all.

Just for a minute, a few seconds, a couple of heartbeats, anything.

She needs it to _stop_.

No doubt paying close attention, Pigsy grunts and says, “Bad?”

Sandy sighs.

“It’ll be fine,” she says, opening her bleary eyes to meet his. She doesn’t deny it, though, too tired to even try and shape a convincing lie. “Once we reunite with the others and get out of the barren lands.”

Once they’re back in a world with fresh water, she means. Back in a world where she can hear its whispers in her head, taste its coolness her throat, draw comfort from it as she has so many times before.

Though he almost certainly doesn’t believe her, Pigsy is generous enough to pretend he does. “You think they miss us?” he asks, with a smile that looks more like a grimace. “Monkey and Tripitaka, I mean. Reckon they’re doing all right?”

_Better than us, certainly,_ Sandy thinks.

She’s glad they have each other, grateful that she doesn’t have to worry about either one of them in her absence. She’s glad that Tripitaka has Monkey to protect him; she has enough horrors in her head without being haunted by visions of the delicate little monk alone in the wasteland, hunted by demons, with no-one to guard him. Monkey is powerful, even without the full range of his abilities; whatever other faults he may have, Sandy knows he will keep Tripitaka safe from any threat.

She’s glad, too, that Monkey has Tripitaka to make sure he rations his food and water. Monkey is a lot like Pigsy in many ways, both spoiled of them and superior and selfish to a fault; raised on the Jade Mountain in a position of prestige, Monkey believes himself immune to the laws of survival, no matter that his wastefulness affects those around him far more than himself. Tripitaka may have lived a sheltered life too, but he is a monk, raised to notice and heal the suffering of others, raised to understand the consequences of every action. Even if he has never experienced wilderness survival for himself, Sandy has no doubt he’s familiar with its effects and he will keep Monkey’s baser instincts in check.

They make a perfect team, Monkey and Tripitaka, the god with his physical gifts and the human with his mental ones. Tripitaka is brilliant, dazzlingly so; his mind is more than a match for Monkey’s muscle and fortitude. Sandy wonders sometimes, why they need her and Pigsy at all, with so much ground covered between the two of them.

The thought makes her miserable, makes her feel useless and wretched and small. Stupid, for daring to even imagine she’d have anything of merit to bring to the quest.

“I’m sure they’re doing just fine,” she says to Pigsy, shoving all those thoughts down deep into her private spaces, the ones he will never be allowed to see. “Though I can’t imagine they miss me very much. I did destroy half our water supply, if you’ll remember.”

“How could I forget?” He chuckles, wry, but mostly good natured. “But hey, at least you gave them a bit of entertainment, eh? Who doesn’t love a good pratfall?”

He’s talking about himself, she realises. Flat on his back, sprawled out in the sodden sand, dripping with wasted water, the exploded skin limp and useless in his hand. Like the incident was never anything more than that, like it never held any deeper meaning at all. Just an accident, a ‘pratfall’, an idiot flat on his back in the sand.

Like it wasn’t an act of violence.

Like it wasn’t an act of _pain_.

Like it wasn’t a response, from the deepest parts of herself, to the lifetime of suffering he brought down on her head.

She hopes it’s hyperbole. Pigsy, making things easy, making them digestible, to try and make himself feel better.

If not...

No.

She won’t let herself think about that. Won’t let herself wonder...

She has to believe there is some shred of self-awareness somewhere inside of him. Some part of him, however small, that understands the need for penance. She has to believe that somewhere deep inside himself he understands the awful things he did, the awful things she endured because of it. She has to believe that he will eventually be able to smother all his senseless bravado, the shrugs and grins, the forced indifference and too-cool carelessness, and admit—

No. Not admit.

_Apologise_.

She has to believe that he will one day be able to look her in the eye, swallow his pride, and say he’s sorry.

If not, why did she go through all this trouble to bring him back?

Why is she sprawled out on the cooling sand, dehydrated and desperately wounded, choking on misery and nausea, trying to hold her mangled leg together long enough to reunite with the monk who gave her life purpose? Why is she here in the barren lands, alone with him, letting him depend on her for his own survival, if she doesn’t earnestly believe he’ll get there in the end?

She has to believe it. She has to.

She sighs, massages her pounding temples, and asks, “How are your ribs?”

He hesitates just a beat too long.

“Can’t complain,” he says, transparently evasive. “All things considered.”

Sandy glares. “How are your ribs?”

“Like I said,” he snaps, voice rising to match hers in sharpness, “Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Pigsy...”

“I’m serious.” To his credit, he looks that way. It’s a rare enough look on him that she actually takes note in spite of herself. “You just worry about yourself, all right? Got enough on your plate already without fretting over my stupid bloody ribs. Save your energy for where it’s needed, you hear me?”

His voice is thick now, with the familiar frustration and self-loathing. Sandy knows what that means, as surely as if he’d confessed it aloud: he’s in a a great deal of pain and doesn’t want her to know about it.

Perhaps he even thinks he deserves it. 

Sandy doesn’t disagree.

She decides not to push further, for now.

“I could bind them for you,” she tells him instead, “but that would restrict your breathing. If it’s still difficult to draw a full breath, I’d recommend leaving them as they are.” She coughs, feeling the dull mnemonic throb of old, long-healed hurts. “Speaking from experience.”

“Right.” He makes a grim face. “Is there anything you don’t have experience with?”

Only he doesn’t really mean ‘anything’. He means, specifically, ‘any kind of pain’.

“No.” She mulls it over, then amends: “Well, perhaps a few things. But very little.”

It’s an achievement, she supposes, that she doesn’t blame him this time.

At least, not out loud.

Pigsy seems to consider this for a little while, like he’s trying to figure out what to do with the information. Sandy is briefly irrationally frightened that he’ll try to press her for more details, ask her to paint the dry, darkening air with all the colours of her past pain, scrawl out a parade of suffering for his entertainment and—

No. Not entertainment.

She has more faith in him than that, at least.

If he does ask for details, it will be because they hold value: knowledge and learning, so that he might use some of her old wounds to balm his new ones.

Like Tripitaka, she thinks, swallowing hard. She should be proud of him for that. She should admire—

She does not. And apparently her teeth are bared in a warning, because he takes one look at her face, clears his throat, then swiftly changes tack.

“Guess you’re the expert, then,” he says, and lets the subject drop. “If you say it’s better unbinded—”

“Unbound,” Sandy corrects automatically.

Pigsy ignores her. “—who am I to argue?”

Sandy tries to chuckle, but the sound doesn’t make it out of her chest. Her throat is razor-dry again, thick with dehydration and clogged with resurfacing nausea.

It’s not unexpected. She’s been seated for a while now, and it’s getting harder to distract herself from her throbbing leg. Immobility is a curse, she’s learned many times; she can push her body for days on less than nothing in the name of survival, but stuck in one place she has only the misery to occupy her thoughts.

At least when she was in motion she had the horizon, the path ahead, the world around her. She has a fixed destination, a purpose, a focus; keeping her eyes and her mind on those things, keeping her body turned in the proper direction helped to keep her teeth clenched and her spine straight, helped her to think past the pain.

Now, stuck here until the dawn, all she has to think about is how badly it hurts.

She wishes they could keep moving. She wishes she could navigate this place by starlight like she could the twists and turns of the town that so hated her. Wishes she could keep her mind separate from her body, wishes she could keep her thoughts closed off from the pain, blockades set up around her shredded nerves.

She wishes she was better at this.

She used to be, she’s sure. The first time, the tenth, the hundredth. Maybe the thousandth too, who can say? 

One time too many, perhaps. Maybe her body is simply worn out from all the abuses over the years. Maybe—

She balls her fists in the sand. Fine and fluid, it drifts through the cracks between her fingers, hard catch and harder to hold. She wishes the pain would flee so easily, wishes she could so effortlessly sift through all her thoughts and memories, find the good ones she’s lost and discard the bad ones that won’t leave her alone.

It wouldn’t work, of course. Her mind, like the rest of her, only resembles sand when it’s wet: stubborn and messy, it sticks to unwanted things and is utterly impossible to wash away.

Eyes closed, she says to Pigsy, “You should get some sleep.”

He grunts his surprise. “You haven’t eaten. And besides—”

“I’ll eat when I can,” she promises, for her own sake rather more than his. “And I can keep watch. I don’t imagine I’ll get very much rest anyway, given my...” She winces, squeezing another fistful of sand and struggling to breathe. Then, to distract them both from her too-obvious discomfort, “I promise not to slit your throat while you sleep.”

“Oh, great bloody comfort, that.” He snorts, but it carries more warmth than sarcasm. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Increasingly desperate for a distraction, she turns to more practical matters. The night is drawing in fast, and he’s been shivering almost since they stopped moving. Sandy watches him for only a beat, then shrugs out of her cloak, balls it up, and tosses it to him without a word.

He stares at it, visibly puzzled. “What the blazes is this for?”

“It’s going to get colder as the night goes on,” she explains, apparently not as unnecessarily as she thought. “We have no means of making a fire, and you are lacking half your shirt.”

He grins, only too happy to throw her insincere words back at her: “You’re welcome.”

Sandy rolls her eyes, then waves a hand at her cloak. “You’ll need the extra warmth.”

Clearly cynical, he holds the thing up to the rising moon, peering at it from all possible angles. “It’s more holes than fabric,” he points out, not unjustly. “You really think it’ll do the least bit of good?”

“It’s all we have,” Sandy snaps, feeling her temper start to rise. “And you’re already shivering, so use it.”

He blinks, first at the cloak and then at her. “What about you?”

His sincerity might be touching, if Sandy had reached a point of being touched by anything. But she has not, and certainly not from him. The laughter that wrenches out of her in response — because really, what else can she do? — has an edge to it, jagged and just a little bit spiteful.

“I’m at home in the cold.” Said simply, because simplicity is all she can manage right now. “You’re not.”

He cocks his head a little, like he wants to argue but knows he doesn’t stand a chance. Their bodies speak for themselves, giving them both away: where he is already frozen, his bare, bruised chest pricked with goosebumps, she is serene and calm, unaffected by the plummeting temperature. The desert chill is a hellish thing to one not used to seeing ice on their breath, but to Sandy, who has spent much of her life with winter’s teeth buried in deep, it’s just another night.

After a long, assessing beat, Pigsy sighs and draws the cloak around his shoulders. Accepting the offering for the gift it maybe was.

“You know,” he says, a little too conversational, “you’re making me look bad.”

Sandy laughs again. Acerbic now, and carrying the faintest hint of a warning.

“You’re doing that perfectly well all on your own,” she says flatly. “I’m only making myself look better.” It would take more strength than she has to keep the bitterness from touching her face, and so she doesn’t try. “After a lifetime of learning these lessons, I’d say I’ve earned it, wouldn’t you?”

He has no answer, and so he doesn’t give one.

Instead, no doubt discomfited by the cold, unwelcome truth, he changes the subject.

“It’s warmer than it looks,” he remarks, pulling the cloak a little tighter around him.

Sandy smirks only a little. “Yes, it is.”

The corners of his mouth twitch at that, not in a smile but in a sort of wince, like he wants to say something else. Something serious, if the sudden lines under his eyes are any indication; there is a heaviness in them now that wasn’t there a moment ago, discomfort that comes from something more than his bruised ribs, more than his need for too much food or water or warmth, more than the way he depends on her to stay alive.

She can feel it tugging at her as well, a new kind of tension pulled so taut the only way to break free would be to cut it away completely.

There is so much that needs to be said, so much pain to bring out and lay bare, so many pieces of hers that intersects with his and for perhaps the first time since they joined the quest she thinks she sees a hint of it spasming in his throat. A test, perhaps, to see if his tongue is strong enough to hold the weight of so many long and difficult words.

Apparently it is not, because when he finally finds the courage to speak, all that comes out is, “Sure.”

Sandy doesn’t know why she feels disappointed. She doesn’t know why she tastes acid in her mouth, a bitterness not borne of pain or nausea but something else, less pleasant and much harder to swallow down.

She doesn’t let it show. She doesn’t look at him at all.

She turns away completely, fingers spasming in rhythm with her breath, fine grains of sand pressed into the lines on her palms, crushed into something even finer.

“Go to sleep,” she says. “I’ll keep watch.”

He grunts a barely-coherent acknowledgement then does as he’s told, drawing her cloak over him like a blanket as he spreads himself out at the base of the rock.

Sandy watches the darkening skyline, listens to the rhythm of his breathing as it slows and grows even. Just like that: a grunt and a groan as he makes himself comfortable, a mumbled “g’night”, and then he’s out cold. Fast asleep, in less than the time it took her to unclench her fists.

Sandy never imagined there would come a time where she would envy him for anything.

But out here under the full desert moon, biting down on screams of pain as he slips so effortlessly into slumber, she finds there is little she wouldn’t give to be in his body instead of her own.

*


	9. Chapter 9

*

The night is long, cold, and far from restful.

At least, it is for Sandy. She dozes fitfully, slipping into sleep only to be jolted awake a few seconds later by her injuries or unwanted memories of her time in the demons’ prison, the drugs and the darkness addling her mind, driving her to despair, to panic, to—

To jolting awake, again, a moment after drifting off.

And so it goes, on and on, hour after hour, all through the night. A few seconds here, a minute or two there, fleeting fragments of half-sleep shot through with never-ending periods of alertness and agony, of biting down on her sleeve to keep from crying out in pain or horror.

When the sun at last begins to crest the horizon, she is exhausted far more by the relentless misery than by the lack of sleep.

Pigsy, for his part, fares rather better.

His rest is disturbed as well, not just by discomfort but by dreams as well. In this, however, his self-preservation is far superior to hers: he will not give up a good night’s respite for anything, even his own discomfort, and so he stubbornly stays asleep through it all. 

Sandy lies on her back in the sand, wide awake and miserable, staring up at the stars and trying to lose herself in their blinking and twinkling, trying all the harder to block out the grate of Pigsy’s voice as he dreams, the murmurs and mutters, the toneless commands and the cowering moans, the whimpering and whining and wailing.

She tells herself she feels nothing. She tells herself it’s pain or memory that makes her flinch, not the sharpness of his tone when he barks out orders like, “Lock them up,” or “Take them away,” or, “Don’t hold back.” She tells herself she is unaffected, indifferent and careless when he sucks in a rasping, painful-sounding breath and cries, “Not again,” or “Don’t make me watch,” or, just once, “ _Please_...”

If Tripitaka were here, he would surely take pity on him. Nudge him awake, the way he does with Monkey sometimes when he’s plagued by bad dreams, or else try to soothe him in his sleep until he’s resting more peacefully. Kind, compassionate gestures, human and monastic and certainly the right thing to do, but Sandy does nothing of the sort. Wouldn’t, even if she were able to stand up and go to him.

She tries not to think about it at all. Shuts it out as best she can, and tells herself it’s because he needs the sleep, no matter what dreadful dreams may come with it.

Tells herself too, during the worst parts, that whatever tortures find him in his unconsciousness are of his own making anyway. He deserves them, she decides, and tries not to listen.

It’s more than she could say for Monkey, twitching and moaning at visions he never talks about. More than she could say for Tripitaka, who cries and sobs in his sleep for a Scholar he’ll never see again and a home he never wanted to leave.

More than she could say for herself, too, all those times she woke in the black of the sewer, strangled by her own screams, with no-one there to tell her she was safe.

Because she wasn’t. Because—

Her nightmares are of Pigsy’s making as well. She has no sympathy for his.

So she tells herself.

Over and over and over, she tells herself this, and when Pigsy finally stirs to wakefulness, blinking in the half-light of coming dawn, she has almost, almost twisted her sleep-deprived mind into believing it.

“Eat quickly,” she tells him, without preamble or compassion. “We should get moving before the heat starts to rise.”

He blinks at her, bleary and yawning, clearly still waking up. Sandy pretends not to notice the lines under his eyes, or the way his mouth is drawn into a tight, miserable line.

“You got it, boss,” he says, sounding weary.

She throws another of the demons’ meat strips at him, rather more aggressively than is strictly needed. 

“Make it last,” she tells him, not for the first time.

He catches it with less effort than she expects, grunts his affirmation, and tears into the thing with his usual starved-orphan hopefulness. Apparently the bad night has done little to ease his appetite.

“Don’t suppose you’d let me have one or two of those hazelnuts too?” he asks, before he’s even finished the first bite. “You know, to wash this stuff down?”

Sandy rolls her eyes, but allows it just this once, slides over a couple of the smaller ones in the hopes it will shut him up.

Her own attempt at breakfast — a fistful of the demons’ seeds, chewed and swallowed with considerable effort — is ultimately a waste of resources. They seethe in her stomach when she finally gets them down, then come straight back up with her first attempt to stand; the pain in her leg explodes into a blinding, bursting crescendo, and the loss of a meal is the least of her concerns.

It’s not the only thing she fails to keep down: her scream, unfettered and irrepressible, is more humiliating by far.

Pigsy, already on his feet by then, clears his throat. “Shame,” he says, referring to the waste and pretending not to hear the scream.

Sandy shrugs, shaking and swallowing convulsively. “It happens.”

“Right.” He studies her for a beat or two, then holds out the waterskin with one of his most cheerfully encouraging smiles; Sandy doesn’t have the heart to tell him his feints at kindness only make her feel worse. “Drink as much as you need, yeah? I’ll go without, if it comes down to that.”

Feeling too sick to argue, Sandy rinses her mouth, then takes a long, careful swallow. The water is somewhat cooler after the night’s chill, and more refreshing than it should be; she lets it sit in her belly for a while, soothing and calming her body and her mind, then readies herself for another attempt at getting her rebellious body upright.

No doubt thanks to the water, it happens more easily this time. Planting her scythe in the sand as firmly as she can, she hauls herself back up, bit by by, until she’s standing on her own. The queasy combination of exertion and pain makes her retch again, but her body knows better than to ever reject water; that, at least, stays where it’s needed.

“When we reunite with the others,” she moans, clutching her scythe like the lifeline it is, “I’m never standing up again.”

Pigsy chuckles. It’s hoarse and a little shaky — for all that he slept and she didn’t, he doesn’t look much better than she feels — but at least he has the strength to try. 

“I’ll just be happy to get a decent meal,” he quips, then gazes mournfully down at his bruise-mottled chest. “And maybe a new shirt.”

Sandy grimaces, touching the dust-sprinkled fabric pulled tight around her maimed leg. “Sorry,” she sighs. “But if it counts for anything, I appreciate the sacrifice.”

He waves it away. “Reckon I owed you,” he says. Then, as if realising what he’s said, he coughs and adds, rather too hastily, “You know, for getting us out of the wreckage and all.”

It seems to have slipped his mind that she was the reason they needed to get out in the first place. Sandy decides not to remind him.

The moment passes quickly, as it must if they are to continue, but it stays with her longer than she expects. The briefest exchange, discomfort for discomfort and a wry quip from him to cover it up. But it says a great deal, at least to Sandy, that it happened at all. That she allowed it to.

That she would drop her guard so much, admit her discomfort to him, even just briefly, and thank him for his small part in making it less.

That he would see enough in her too, to know that it was safe to respond in kind, that she wouldn’t glare or assault him for speaking to her so openly. A moment, just a fleeting little moment... but when have they ever shared such a moment before?

Sandy blames the pain, of course. And the nausea. And the strain, worse and worse each time, of staying on her feet.

Easier to keep her focus on those things, she decides. Easier to blame them for the way she’s cut open and laid bare, her insides raw and bleeding, her outsides too shaky to hold them down. Easier to think of her own weaknesses than admit she might be thinking of something else, that a small, sad little part of her might be remembering the way his voice cracked and broke as he cried out in his dreams. 

Easier to blame her own suffering, she decides, than to imagine she might feel something, after all, for his.

*

It happens again a few hours later.

A moment of discomfort — no, more: a moment of _weakness_ — blurted out and shared before she can stop herself, almost before she even realises she’s doing it.

She tells herself she has no choice.

It might even be true.

Her leg is a torture this morning, the pain growing worse as the hours bleed out; every movement tugs at the torn muscle and the bone beneath, making her feel like she’s tearing it up more and more the further she goes. Barely endurable, certainly unsustainable: she knows her limits well enough to see that.

If she doesn’t find a way to lessen the misery, she won’t be able to go on. This is fact, plain and simple if unwelcome, and one she has learned from experience more times than she’d care to remember. The pain will devour her if she doesn’t temper it soon; it will chew her up and swallow her whole, leaving behind nothing but sand and a disjointed voice ordering Pigsy to keep going, to eat and drink sparingly, to tell Tripitaka she would have loved to dedicate her life to him...

She won’t allow it.

She will not be cheated out of a chance to see through the quest she’s waited half her life to begin. She survived too much, suffered too much. She will not let it take her now.

She has to find a way to ease it.

She has to, and more and more with each throbbing, torturous step, she realises she cannot do that alone.

That it won’t be the first such moment they’ve shared...

She won’t let herself admit that offers a bit of comfort.

Still, she puts it off for as long as she can, breathing, swallowing, breathing some more, then not breathing at all for minutes at a time. She cycles through every weapon in her arsenal, every trick and talent she learned over the years to dull pain, to block it out or drive it down or beat it into submission; she uses every skill she picked up, every method she has of pushing her body to and through its considerable limits, everything she learned from those too-frequent moments when giving in would have meant death.

Her survival instincts are viciously keen. In all those years living like a prey animal she never found their match. Nothing anyone did to her — humans, demons, Pigsy, even her own family — was ever enough to bring her down. She will not be brought down now by her own inability to admit that she might need help.

She knows her limits. She knows when she’s reached them. And she has.

Her teeth are clenched when she calls him to a stop, and she can’t keep the discomfort from reaching her voice as well. His name, terse and clipped even on a good day, sounds more like something caught in the throat of a wild, hungry beast.

He pulls to a stop right away, and the question half-formed on his tongue dissolves instantly when he catches sight of her face.

“Oh,” he says, like the sweat beading on on her brow and the tension whitening her jaw is all the explanation he needs. “Bad?”

He’s not touching her — he’s not even particularly close, his surer step having taken him some paces ahead — but still the urge to growl rises up in her. Another instinct she’s honed too well: to eliminate anyone who sees her weak points, and all the more so when her body still remembers him as its enemy.

She wonders if she would still feel so sharp inside if it were someone else. How much is survival, and how much is simply him? If it were Tripitaka...

She thinks back to the stream, to the look on his face as he stared at her hands, the way he reached for them, tried to touch them. They were fine, mended in a moment from the smallest scratch, but still the thought of him seeing the place where the knife had slipped, touching her there, knowing and seeing and understanding...

Her body responded then too. Flinching, rearing back, readying to defend itself, even against the one whose name was her salvation.

It’s worse with Pigsy, to be certain. Everything is worse with Pigsy, even the not-so-bad things. But at least in this it’s not only him.

She gets herself back under control. Reminds herself she can’t afford to waste so much energy. Tempers her survival instincts and redirects them where it matters.

“Bad,” she confirms, clenching her jaw even harder, willing her fists to loosen on her scythe, holding her body as still and steady as she can. “I think, uh... I think I need...”

Her mouth is dry, her throat drier. It hurts to speak, it hurts to try, and the words tangle in her head, terrifying. She can’t say it, she can’t admit to it, she can’t, she—

“Okay.” But apparently he understands just as well, even without the words, because he’s turning around, closing a little bit of the space between them and holding out his rake to bridge the rest. “An extra leg, maybe?”

Sandy stares at him, then at the rake. “It’s... um, I...”

She is not as good at this as she’d hoped. Sharing her weakness, sharing her discomfort, sharing any part of herself with him at all. It’s so much harder when he’s close, when his rake is right there in front of her, shaking just a little in his grasp. Hers if she wants it: an extra leg, a helping hand, and a deadly weapon all at the same time. It’s everything she needs to keep her going but it’s still _his_ , and the thought of touching it makes her skin crawl.

If she squints hard enough, she’s sure she can see his fingerprints on the haft, the places he grips extra tight when he shatters the earth or calls down the lightning. If she squinted harder still, she wonders if she would see the stains of her own blood.

She stands there for a long, long time, clinging to her weapon and staring numbly at his, paralysed and lost. She needs the help, she knows she does, but she can’t bring herself to reach out and take it; she can’t seem to make her body move at all, suspended between the survival instincts that have kept her alive thus far — the ones that know his rake only as an instrument of horror and destruction — and the ones she knows she’ll need if she wants to keep moving.

She needs it. But she hates it, and perhaps a small part of her is afraid of it too.

Pigsy doesn’t rush her. The rake must be dreadfully heavy to him, held out like that without even touching the ground, but he doesn’t complain and he doesn’t take it back. No sign of weakness in him, though she knows he must surely feel as bad as she does.

He stands, he holds, he waits.

And even if it takes her a lifetime to accept what her body knows she must, she has no doubt he will still be there, standing, holding, and waiting.

Not for the first time, Sandy is reminded of Locke’s prison. Of Tripitaka bursting through the barred door with Pigsy close on his heels. Of the flood of emotion that followed, so intense and confusing it nearly drove her down to her knees: surprise and elation, of course, but then immediately the sick dread that came with seeing his face. His name in her head, echoing over and over, long before Tripitaka ever said it out loud, and she stood there, stuck in place as though pinned down by some great big invisible hand, unable to move.

She wanted to run, but he had her scythe. She wanted to throw herself at him, to wring his neck with her bare hands and end him once and for all. She wanted to huddle in the corner of that stinking, awful prison cell, curled up in self-protection, cowering, cringing, pathetic, whatever it took to keep from having to hear his voice again. She was terrified, she was furious, she was paralysed; she felt and wanted and needed so many different things all at once, she was unable to process them all.

“He’s going to help us get out of here,” Tripitaka told them, and Sandy wanted to believe him because he was Tripitaka, because he was there, rescuing them just as she’d known he would. She wanted to believe him because she’d sworn long ago to follow him in anything, but how could she follow him in this? How could she walk side-by-side with the monster who had locked them up in the first place, the monster who had named her ‘demon’, the monster whose words she wore under her skin like the marks his human friends had left on its surface? 

Frozen. Numb. And she thought she heard her own voice echoing off the damp, dank walls — “I want to hear it from him...” — only it didn’t sound like her at all.

Too calm, too steady. Nothing like the roiling madness she was feeling.

A beat, then another, and the world seemed to shrink down to a moment so much like this one: him standing there with a weapon in his hand, pointed at her: an offering, not a threat.

Standing, holding, waiting.

Her instincts took over, then, unable to resist the gleam of her scythe, the cell door thrown open, the promise of escape. Survival, just like always; she could not afford to think of anything else. She took back her weapon, did not use it to kill him, then quietly shut down her mind and let her body do the rest.

Survival, then and now.

Then: escape. Now: something very different.

A weapon in his hand, held out with the sharp parts pointing at her chest. An offering not a threat. Helping, not hurting.

She can’t—

He hasn’t moved. She doesn’t know how long she’s stood like this, paralysed and remembering, but he hasn’t even twitched. He’s still there, safe and sound, a couple of paces away, still holding out his weapon like a white flag between them. Still looking at her, but there’s a light in his eye now that wasn’t there before. Pity, and a strange, quiet sort of recognition.

“You want to take a break?” he asks, encouraging but not pushing. “Sit down for a bit, catch your breath?”

She shakes her head. “I won’t be able to stand up again.”

But then, of course, she can barely stand now, so what difference would sitting down make?

Still, Pigsy knows not to press her too hard, and he shrugs it off like he never asked. “Okay.”

“Yes.” She can’t stop staring at his rake. “Yes, I, um...”

He’s studying her closely, head cocked to the side like he’s trying to make eye-contact. Like Tripitaka did back when this all started, after the waterskin exploded, when Sandy couldn’t even lift her head to tell him what she’d done. She was paralysed then, just as she is now, but for entirely different reasons. The two moments scrape against each other inside her head, making her feel strange and confused. She wants to hide, she wants to run, she wants to—

“Okay,” Pigsy says again, quietly cutting through her wild thoughts. “Okay, hold still. Here we go...”

And without touching her, almost without moving at all, he guides the haft of his rake into her hand.

Sandy doesn’t resist. A part of her feels like she should be marvelling at his dexterity, but she doesn’t even have the faculties to do that. She’s still fixated on the rake, gaping and gawking, like a cornered prey animal unable to tear its gaze from the predator that will soon rip its body apart.

She stares at the prongs, curved and deadly, remembers how they would look in the middle of the night in Palawa, crackling with electricity as he hammered on some hapless villager’s door, a thousand little lightning-bolts just waiting for the right target.

She turns the thing around, redirects the prongs so they’re facing away from her. “Thank you.”

Pigsy cocks his head in a minute nod. “We’re going to hold here for a minute,” he tells her, too gently for her sour stomach to digest. “Let you get your bearings.”

“I don’t need...”

“How did I know you’d say that?” He tries to smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Fine, fine. We’re going to hold here for a minute, so I can get _my_ bearings. Okay?”

She comes back to herself a little, then, enough to notice rasp of his breathing, familiar if rather unwelcome, the way he’s clearly struggling to get air past his sore ribs. 

“Okay,” she says, very quietly.

She does use the time for herself as well, though of course she doesn’t let him see it. The steel of the rake feels strange and unsettling against her palm, like the push and pull of two opposing forces. Water and lightning; she remembers telling him the two do not mix well. Now she holds them both, one in either hand.

Two makeshift crutches, she thinks, for one patchwork god.

The rake isn’t nearly as steady in her hand as it was in Pigsy’s. She can feel the hum of electricity beneath the surface, dozens of little skittering things vibrating against her skin, like it doesn’t want her to touch it any more than she does. Like it knows she was once an enemy. Like it remembers calling down the lightning to pierce her chest, her heart, her—

No.

No, he never did that. He never—

Not to her.

But she saw him do it enough times to others, didn’t she?

It was always there. That awful weapon with its sharp prongs and its massive size and its vast, terrible power. Always in his hands, always ready, waiting for his command to call down the nightmares from the sky or tear the earth apart or—

Touching it feels like touching him. Worse, in a way, because the rake is the part of him that holds the power.

But it holds her as well, and she knows that counts for something. Made for destruction, maybe, but there’s no destruction in it now. It keeps her steady, keeps her upright, and it holds its balance in the shifting sand where her mangled leg only screams and shakes and threatens to fall out from under her.

She needs it.

Her qualms are like rocks in her throat; she swallows them down, and tries to summon some moisture to wet her lips. She is parched and she is weak and she is dreadfully afraid, but she needs this and so she will accept it.

Bent double, hands braced on his knees, Pigsy pretends he’s not watching her. “All right?”

Sandy swallows, opts for honesty. “I feel like it’s going to electrocute me at any moment.”

Pigsy musters a shaky laugh, no doubt hoping to reassure her. It doesn’t have the desired effect; somehow it just makes him sound sadder than if he hadn’t laughed at all.

“It won’t,” he says, trying to look sincere. “I promise.”

His promises mean less than nothing. Sandy bites down on a growl, a hiss, a snarl.

Bites down on her memories as well. The rake in his hands, the earth and the sky, the lightning binding them together.

“I think,” she says, since she’s already being honest, “my wounded leg is the only thing stopping me from hurting you.”

The forced smile drops off his face.

“I think so too,” he sighs, nearly as softly as her.

Under her fingers, the rake hums.

Sandy wishes she could throw the horrible thing away. She wants to run, wants to escape, wants to hide. She doesn’t even really know what from; there are so many horrors swirling all around her, how could she choose just one? His eyes, too warm. His hands, too close. His weapon, buzzing and vibrating against her palm. Or maybe just herself, and all the dark thoughts she still can’t force down, the pains in her mind far worse than the pains in her leg.

She wants her sewer, her shadows, her private space.

She wants Tripitaka, his terrifying compassion and his awful faith, though she knows she doesn’t deserve him.

She wants to feel safe, but she knows she never will.

Pigsy shuffles back to where he was before: a safe distance away, scanning the horizon. “Good to keep going?”

Sandy opens her lungs, closes her mind. “Of course.”

The sand shifts under her feet. The scythe supports her on one side, the rake on the other. Balanced between them, two beautiful and powerful weapons, two opposing elements, she feels small and vulnerable. Like a wounded animal or an orphaned child. Like everything she used to be — wild and violent and scared — and a little bit, too, like the one thing in all the world she never was and could never be.

 _Human_.

*

After her family, before Tripitaka, there was only one.

A whole world full of humans — more of them than demons and gods and every other kind of creature all put together, so it sometimes seemed — but in all those long years only one of them ever spoke to her.

Really spoke, to her and not at her. Like she was real, like she was a person, like she was somehow like him. No fear or hatred, no threats or pleas or curses, no swinging fists or snapping kicks, no blades or burns or spilled blood.

Just words.

He did more with his words, the Scholar, than anyone Sandy had ever met.

He did more with his words than all the world’s demons could ever do with their weapons, than all the other humans could ever do with their bodies, than any being, real or mythical, could achieve with all the resources in the whole wide world. He spoke and she listened, and that alone was remarkable because she had no reason to listen to anyone. No reason to trust that he wouldn’t use his fists instead, no reason not to hide the moment he showed himself.

She still doesn’t know why she didn’t.

The Scholar spoke, and Sandy listened. And sometimes she learned things and sometimes she didn’t. But she always tried, because he had a way about him that made her want to be better.

Just as she feels now, with Tripitaka. Just as she tries—

And fails.

The first thing the Scholar tried to teach her, also the first thing she failed to learn: compassion.

Compassion for herself: her first failure.

Compassion for others, even for those who may not seem to deserve it: her second failure, and in his eyes by far the worst.

He told her not to hate the people who would hurt her or kill her or worse.

He told her not to hate Pigsy, specifically. He who had thrown her to the wolves, who barked his orders and crawled back to his palace and his pillows before the blood began to flow.

“You don’t know what pain he might be suffering in turn,” the Scholar told her.

Sandy didn’t care about Pigsy’s pain, or about his suffering. She only cared about her own. The things his people did to her, the worse things they threatened to do if they could just catch her without her powers or her speed or her strength. The things they did with their weapons and their hands, the things they did with their words; she could never quite tell which ones hurt more, and thinking about it only made her less inclined to listen to him.

They argued. The Scholar with his soft speech and his beautiful words, and Sandy with her hard anger and roiling pain. He reasoned, he spoke to her gently and quietly, he tried to teach her kindness by showing her something of the same, and she thrashed and wailed and drove her fists into the walls again and again and again.

She wasn’t like him: she had no words, no voice, and no gift for using either of those things. She didn’t know how to speak like him, how to make herself heard. She certainly didn’t know how to argue with reason and thought, how to meet with resistance and not assume that violence would soon follow.

Where would she have learned such things? She only knew words as another kind of weapon, another kind of cruelty to resist and rail against, another threat to hide from or else attack before they could take her and use her. They had no other meaning to her, words, and when their conversations turned sour and the Scholar tried to calm her — first with his voice, and then with his hands — all she could see were threats and warnings. 

She was wrong. That was all she saw, all she heard, all she knew. She was always wrong, she always had been wrong, and soon his voice would turn cold and his hands would grow hard and then he would—

He didn’t, of course.

Just like Tripitaka, the young monk he would raise in his image, the Scholar had nothing but kindness in his heart. But Sandy could not understand such a strange thing, and so she stopped fighting and crawled into the corner and hid herself away until he was gone.

When he came back, long after her blood had cooled, he stood as far away from her as the little underground chamber allowed, with his arms spread wide in front of him and his body all exposed so she could see that he would do her no harm. He stood there for a long time, not saying anything at all until she crept out of her hiding place and looked at him.

Finally, very quietly, he said, “He’s not the enemy you think he is.”

Sandy hissed and did not speak.

The Scholar didn’t seem to mind her silence. Just as he never minded her outbursts, the anger and pain that tore out of her in fits and explosions and howls. He never minded the worst of her; he always told her she was more than what the world had made her, that she would learn, in time, to be more than the thing she’d been forced to become.

“He’s just a victim of circumstance,” he told her. “The same as you.”

Sandy growled again. It made her throat burn, but she didn’t care.

“I’m not a victim of circumstance,” she rasped. “I’m a victim of _him_.”

The Scholar’s face grew very, very sad.

“You’re a victim of many things,” he said, so softly it made her ache. “You can’t blame him for all of them.”

Perhaps not. But she wanted to.

She wanted—

“I don’t want to to talk about it,” she said, and turned back towards her hiding place.

His sigh halted her before she could disappear.

Disappointment: she could taste it on the air. It was a softer blow than anger, less brutal than hatred or fear or disgust, but it still stung. She hid her face, upset and ashamed, and a part of her wished he would just call her ‘demon’ or ‘monster’ like all the other humans did, so she could hate him too and not want so badly to make him happy.

He said, “Locke has made him into your enemy. What do you imagine she would do to him if he became your friend?”

She knew the answer, of course. She’d seen the way Locke treated him when they were alone, and she’d heard the way his guards and minions spoke about him, about her, about their relationship. She’d seen the humiliation colour his cheeks, the flickers of panic turning them pale again; she had watched him harden himself again and again, so that he might send another god to his doom and not be seen to cry for the loss.

She knew—

She _knows_.

But there are wounds inside of her too raw to touch, too deep to clean, too badly infected to ever heal. Wounds that would tear her apart far more brutally than a mangled leg or broken rib if she tried to let them out. 

And his face is familiar, and his eyes are familiar, and his hands are a symbol of the only truth she’s ever known — that warmth must turn cold, softness grow hard, compassion be twisted into hate — and the anger-fear- _anger_ she feels when she looks at him is the only kind of emotion she really understands.

The Scholar tried to teach her compassion. For herself, for others, and for Pigsy most of all. He tried to make her see that his feather pillows had teeth, that his hot meals were spiced with poison, that his soft luxuries were just as hard and painful as her broken bones and the blood that soaked her hands. He tried to make her see that he had been made, just as she had, into a monster he was never supposed to be, that he was a scapegoat of a different kind, that maybe he too had wounds that festered.

She didn’t care. She didn’t want to hear it. She definitely didn’t want to talk about it.

“He’s a monster,” she said, slinking back into the shadows at last. “And if he’s not, I am.”

“Neither of you are,” the Scholar said, looking desperately sad. “You’re both prisoners.”

True or not, Sandy hated him for that. For imagining that Pigsy’s prison, built out of feather pillows and fine food, could be anything like hers, carved as it was out of blood-soaked bones.

He feasted while she starved. He slept in luxury and comfort while she lay shivering with cold, sweating with fever, screaming with pain. He slept at all while she sat awake with a weapon clutched to her chest, terrified to drop her guard for even a moment lest his people find her and—

What a terrible prison it must have been, she thought, to wrap him up in jewels and leave him wanting for nothing.

She understands a little better now, but it’s no easier to swallow than it was back then. It is too messy, too painful; it would mean rearranging every thought in her head, every instinct that kept her alive. It would mean becoming something new, something she is not yet ready to be, relearning kindness and compassion as things not to be feared but to strive towards.

Impossible.

It still is, even now, but it was all the more so back then. She barely got through a day without blood, hers or theirs or both. Barely got through a minute or a moment without some fresh horror, some new nightmare, some enemy waiting to strike her down. With all of that to contend with, hells upon hells to haunt her every waking hour, how could she be expected to step back and see the world in new ways? To see him not as her tormentor but as someone equally tormented, someone grappling with their own terrible pain?

To see him as—

To _see_ him.

She couldn’t.

She can’t.

And here she is now, holding on to his rake, his weapon, his power. Holding on to it for strength, for balance, for survival; it’s a crutch, it’s an extra limb, it’s an extension of her failing body, but it is _his_ and it hurts to hold it.

She does hold it, though, because she has no choice. Hands slick with sweat, tasting the tang of electricity on her tongue, its crackle like a brand inside her head. Its surface is just like his skin, cool and steady on the surface but stained with blood underneath, helping and hurting her all at once, and she can’t touch it without recalling his touches too, that first day, soft and then hard, transforming them both into monsters with only the press of his palm.

His rake keeps her upright. It keeps her moving, and that keeps them both alive. But it hurts, and the contact shudders through her body with each step, little lightning bolts stinging her hands, each one a body, a soul, a scream, a sob, a—

She stops.

She tries to breathe.

She’s shaking.

Shaking, shuddering, with something that runs far deeper than exertion. She’s drenched with sweat, here in this wasteland with no water. She is sick with nothing in her stomach, and her body hurts even in the places where there are no wounds.

At least, none that anyone will ever see.

As though responding to a sound she doesn’t remember making, Pigsy stops and turns to stare at her. The frown on his face is sincere, the warmth in his eyes very real; Sandy can tell that he cares, that he is genuinely worried, and when he asks her again if she needs to stop — “Catch your breath, take a break?” — she can tell that he means it for her sake alone, with no thought at all for his own comfort.

Sandy wishes she could indulge the gesture. However...

“I can’t,” she says, and her throat closes up with the effort of swallowing tears.

His frown deepens, but he doesn’t press her for details.

“How about lunch?” he asks instead, pressing ever so lightly, like monk’s hands dabbing ointment on an open wound. Like Tripitaka, like the Scholar, like so many things he has no right to try to be. “You think you could eat? I could definitely eat.”

And even though she can tell it’s the last thing in the world he wants to do, he grins.

It makes her feel—

It makes her feel like herself again.

Present. Sort of whole.

Closer to it than she was, at least. A little bit angry, a little bit frustrated, a reminder that she is the one who has to keep them both alive, that he is useless and worthless, that he would be starved within a day if she left him alone to his devices, that they have barely been walking a few hours, and already his mouth is watering like—

“Is that all you ever think about?”

The grin loosens, gets more natural.

Like maybe that’s what he wanted to hear, what he was aiming for the whole time, the part of her that thrives on chastening him.

He’s still got that sort-of-gentle sort-of-pushing look on his face, but it’s easing off slightly, relaxing along with the rest of him. Like he’s watching her come back to herself and understands what that means, like he knows her well enough now to recognise the difference between where she was and where she is now, the angry and frightened creature who forgets he’s no longer her enemy, and the almost-a-real-god who is trying to keep them both alive.

She is more of the latter now, thanks to his stupid grin and his stupid question, and apparently he notices it too because there is no strain on his face any more, only warmth.

He makes a show of mulling over her question, not-so-subtly giving her time to catch her breath. _Is that all you ever think about_ , like she ever cared, like it ever mattered, like they—

“Why not?” he answers at last, with a shrug that must certainly hurt his ribs. “I can think of worse things to think about, can’t you?”

Sandy’s grip tightens spasmodically on his rake. The lightning thrums under her skin, the memory of pain, of fear, of the compassion that the Scholar trying so hard to teach her. Of him, Pigsy, standing over her with the weapon in his hand, showing off all his teeth in a grin that is nothing like the one he wears now, of the words ‘demon’ and ‘scapegoat’ and ‘monster’.

She swallows hard, closes her eyes, reminds herself of where they are and who they are.

“Yes,” she says, to him and to his buzzing, nightmarish weapon. “I can think of worse things.”

*

She knows he doesn’t really need lunch.

Her mind may be scattered but she’s not stupid, and even if she was he’s far from subtle.

In the first, he accepts the lone food stick she allows him and doesn’t even try to wheedle her into giving him more. He’s hungry, yes, because he’s always hungry, but he’s certainly not ravenous and he has no real need to stop here and now.

It’s possible, she supposes, that his ribs need the rest — her legs definitely do, even with two crutches now instead of one — but she’s smart enough to recognise the ruse for what it is. He has seen her stumbling, not with her body but inside her mind, and he knows that she needs a little time to withdraw completely from the thing she was, the places she lived, the lessons she didn’t learn.

In his clumsy and self-serving way, he is trying to guide her back to herself.

Sandy doesn’t know how to feel about that. Other than very uncomfortable.

“Sit,” he tells her, in his booming this-isn’t-a-debate voice. “Take a load off.”

Sandy resists, not because she doesn’t need the respite — she does, and rather desperately — but because she would sooner collapse where she stands than ever be forced to obey him again.

She is not yet so much herself that she can let go of that.

“Eat,” she snaps instead. “So we can get moving again.”

Pigsy sighs, then switches tack with impressive grace; he is always so much more talented in manoeuvring his words than his body. Sandy remembers the Scholar again, and feels a nameless pang kicking inside her belly.

“Look,” he says. “Watching you stand there like a sour lemon, groaning and making ouchy faces, is killing my appetite. If you really want me to get through this thing quicker, you’ll sit.”

Sandy only just manages to refrain from crossing her arms and shouting ‘fine!’.

She does sit, however, because she knows that Pigsy really is petulant enough to hold his lunch to ransom if she doesn’t do what he says. But just to be spiteful, she doesn’t stop groaning, nor does she stop making faces.

It is only slightly less of a nightmare, lowering herself to the ground with two crutches instead of one, and she is no less exhausted by the time she’s down. She resists the urge to drink from the waterskin, though her throat is parched and raw once again, opting instead to make another attempt at sustenance. A few more of the seeds from their pack, swallowed and held down with a great force of will, and when she turns to speak with him she does it only to take her mind of the roiling in her stomach.

“How did you know?” she asks, very quietly.

Pigsy’s innocent look is laughable, and thoroughly pointless: he’s surely not trying to fool himself, and he definitely doesn’t fool Sandy.

“What are you on about now?” he asks, entirely too amicably.

Sandy rolls her eyes. “This,” she snaps, gesturing to the empty space all around them. “Stopping here for lunch. Even you can’t possibly be _that_ hungry.”

He chuckles. “Reckon you underestimate my appetite.”

“No, I don’t.” Her jaw wants to clench, but she bites down on the impulse, taking another seed between her teeth and chewing it carefully. “I know exactly how insatiable you are. At all times, and for all things. But we ate breakfast only a few hours ago. Even your stomach is not that soft, and even your constitution is not that weak.” She swallows, then looks him dead in the eye. “You chose now to stop for lunch because you knew I was getting lost inside my head.”

Inside her memories, she means. In the dark, cold corners of herself, the places she wishes she could forget.

“I...” He grimaces. “Yeah. You had that look about you.”

“And you knew how to...” She doesn’t want to say ‘how to bring me back’; there are implications to that, frightening ones she’s not yet ready to face. “You knew the right kind of distraction to... to keep me from drowning in there. Your appetite, and our dwindling supplies.”

The grin is back, only a little shakier than before. “I know how much it annoys you,” he says with a cool but painful-looking shrug. “When I ask for food or whatever else. And I know...”

He stops.

Sandy recognises that particular way of stopping, the way he clamps his teeth down almost mid-word, like his thoughts have caught on some invisible snag, a thorn or a blade somewhere inside him. Confession, or something like it; there is something personal in what he was about to say, something that’s not entirely about her head, her memories, or her drowning. She doesn’t want to wonder, doesn’t want to think about him more than she absolutely has to, and yet...

“Pigsy?”

And yet still she asks.

His name echoes eerily inside her head, reverberating through the space between then and now. It hums and whispers, like the ghost of something forgotten, like the unnatural silence before a storm or before his rake calls down the lightning or before her head hits the ground. It is a strange, dissonant thing, hearing it on her own tongue.

For a while, he doesn’t answer. Silence, but for the grinding of his teeth as he chews his lunch, the heavy gulp as he swallows and wordlessly laments the lack of water. Hard to tell if he’s drawing it out for her sake, to give her something other than her own thoughts to focus on, or for his, to try and evade the moment of confession.

Finally, wearily, he sighs and sits up a little straighter.

“It’s no big deal,” he says, unexpectedly sober. “I just... I know that’s the kind of thing that works for me. Getting worked up over something stupid and pointless. You know? Helps to bring me back to myself when I’m...”

He trails off, features twisting with a pain that is definitely not physical.

Somewhat belatedly, Sandy realises she’s staring. She forces herself to look away, to turn her gaze down to the dusty sand, to her clenching, spasming fingers, to her shaking body.

“For you?” she hears herself echo, in a small, thin voice.

Something shifts in him; she can feel it on the air. It takes her a moment to find courage enough to look up at him again, and when she does she finds his smile has turned wry. A little reflective, sort of, but not in a pensive way. Self-deprecation, probably; he always wears that particularly well. It’s his defence mechanism, like hers is hiding: he thinks he can cushion the blow of opening up by turning it into a joke at his own expense.

“Sure,” he says, trying too hard to look like he cares too little. “You think you’ve got the monopoly on bad memories or something?”

Sandy bristles a little, in spite of herself. Of course she doesn’t; she has seen too many shades of other people’s pain to ever think that.

But there is a difference between watching Tripitaka get lost in his grief over the Scholar, or Monkey drown in nostalgic anger and hurt for the old world and the gods that locked him up, and this: Pigsy, who built his palace on the bones of gods and humans alike.

Whatever bad memories he has, he made them for himself. He hurled himself into the abyss, head-first, and then wondered why it tried to swallow him.

“Are you really claiming it’s the same thing?” she asks him. There’s a hitch in her voice, hoarse and tremulous; she hopes he assumes it’s just dehydration. “Your life was yours by choice. The things you did, you chose to do. To the other gods, to the humans of that town, to...”

_To me._

She doesn’t say it. She doesn’t know that she’ll ever be able to say it. But she touches her face as she trails off, the place where he touched her that first day in the alley, and though she tries and tries to swallow that moment down she still can’t shake the echo of his kindness and the way it grew hard in the very moment she thought it might not. The last gentle touch she ever knew; everything that came after brought the brand of violence, hatred, persecution, of dreadful things done in his name and under his orders.

Bad memories, he says, and her dry tongue floods with the taste of poison. How terrible, she thinks, to dream of his victims’ screams as he lay in comfort on his feather pillows. How awful to hear his own wails only when he woke up safe and protected, to be strangled only by guilt, to beaten or hunted only by shame, to be—

“It wasn’t like you think,” he blurts out, cutting off her rising anger. “It wasn’t some free ride to the penthouse or whatever you imagine it was. All luxuries and creature comforts, the whole bloody world handed to me on a golden plate. It wasn’t like that. It was...” His breath trembles in his throat; the bruises on his chest darken as he tries to draw a breath. “I was _terrified_ , okay?”

Sandy is glad she can’t stand right now. If she could, she’s certain her hands would be on his throat.

“So were we,” she says icily. “Only we were terrified of _you_. What you did to the people of that town. What you did to your fellow gods. What you did to...”

She still can’t say it.

But he can, and this time he does.

“...to you?”

It’s like a blow to the chest. Incendiary, visceral, like a waterskin exploding behind her ribs. Sandy feels like she’s been thrown backwards, like she’s bleeding her guts out right there in the sand, in the dust and the dry air, dying to the sound of his voice.

Like she always assumed she would, one day.

“I’m not saying it’s right.” His voice grates against her nerves and inside her head, a buzzing drone made to drive her mad. “I’m not saying it makes what I did okay. I know it doesn’t. But this idea you have of me living it up in that palace without a care in the world? It wasn’t like that.”

Sandy knows this. She’s known it for a long time. She heard the insults, the warnings, the threats. She saw the danger in Locke’s eyes that day in the palace, heard the taunts and laughter of his human guards, the ones who were supposed to obey and respect him as their superior in every way.

She remembers, too, the Scholar trying to teach her compassion. Again and again he tried to make her see that Pigsy was not her true enemy. Again and again, over and over, he told her that he was just a victim like her, a different sort of prisoner locked up tight in a different sort of cage.

She knows. She does. All of it.

But it doesn’t change anything.

“You paid for that life in blood,” she says, because apparently he still needs the reminder. “My blood, and the blood of others. Other gods, other humans, perhaps other demons too. Everyone’s blood except your own. You must have wanted it very much to pay so highly for it.”

“I...” He sighs. “No. I just knew what the alternative was.”

Sandy doesn’t doubt that for a moment. He sent others to that fate often enough, after all. Every god sold to demons, disappearing into the barren lands or withering away in Locke’s dungeon, every human thrown out of his home for not paying enough or praying enough or saying enough, every meal stolen from the mouths of children and blamed on a monster that never existed.

“Me,” she says hollowly. “I was your ‘alternative’.”

His laughter is dry and entirely lacking in humour.

“Worse by far.” He says it simply, even carelessly, but Sandy can tell it’s taking a great deal of effort for him to talk about this at all. She wishes she could find it in herself to care. “Funny thing about selling your soul: there’s only one way to get it back.”

Easy to assume he means death. Perhaps if Tripitaka or Monkey were here, they would suck in their breath and believe that. But Sandy, being intimately acquainted with far more painful fates, knows he’s not.

She can’t imagine a worse fate than the one she lived. Certainly not death: a flash of discomfort and then an eternity of peace. Far better to die, she thought so many times, than to live out a life — a god’s life, an eternal life — in isolation and fear, anger and pain. Hated by everyone, abandoned and rejected and hunted, a god in one moment, a demon in the next, and who really cared which name stuck in the end when they were both just as bad as each other?

How can he look her in the eye — or avoid looking her in the eye, as he does now, ashamed and self-pitying — and insist that he faced a crueller fate than that?

He does believe it, though. Deluded or not, he truly does. She can see it on his face, in the pale set of his jaw, the haunted look in his eyes, the shadows spreading underneath. He really does believe what he’s saying: that he chose a life of luxury and decadence because the alternative was so unbearably terrifying.

Perhaps it was. Perhaps she simply lacks the imagination or the experience to see what he does. Perhaps Locke spelled it out for him in clear, simple letters, describing in gory, graphic detail all the torments and tortures that would await him if he stepped out of line.

Maybe he’s right, then. Maybe...

It doesn’t matter. True or not, it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t make him better, it doesn’t make him—

“You’re a coward,” she hears herself growl.

It’s only after the word is out that she recalls how much weight it carries for him.

They accused him of the same thing, she remembers before she can stop herself from saying it too. His guards and Locke, and everyone else. _No good for anything,_ they told him, a lash across his shoulders to keep him obedient and docile. _Too weak, too soft, too much of a coward_.

She remembers this too late, watching as his face falls, as he turns away, as his expression goes blank and dark and—

And she recognises that too, the way he seems to shut down in places, the way his whole body seems to deflate and growl limp. The slump of his shoulders, the sudden looseness in his hands. His eyes are downcast now, turned shamefully towards the ground, but if she could meet them she knows that she would find in them the same emptiness he and Tripitaka see in hers when she is lost and drowning, when she remembers the bad days, the worst days, the—

Not hyperbole, then: he really does have moments and memories like hers.

Sandy doesn’t know what to make of that. Her instincts, always especially keen when aimed at him, tell her to feel angry, resentful, to take a swing while he’s down, strike out at his soft parts; he deserves it, doesn’t he? Those instincts cling fast to the version of him she’s held in her chest and her mind for so long: spoiled and pampered and soft. A god who wouldn’t have survived in this wilderness without her help, who has never had to go without anything in his whole life. Why shouldn’t she call him a coward, they seethe, when it’s so obviously true? 

But she has seen him flinch and cringe, and she has heard their laughter and their threats. She was there in Locke’s palace, watching him fall and watching her shout him down. She was there when his guards mocked him together, twisted him into the monster they wanted so that they might have their fun with her. A dozen times or more over the years, she was there, and his haunted face has haunted her too, so much that she ran through the desert to bring him back to the quest.

She knows—

She knew, even before the Scholar told her.

She knows that he was afraid. She knows that he probably had good reason to be. By his standards, at least: a weak, soft-hearted bird of a god, caged in gold by snakes who would unhinge their jaws and swallow him whole. Fear is life, it is what holds the body together when it is failing, what holds the mind together when it threatens to crack. It is _survival_ , and she—

Whatever else she knows, she knows this.

The horror of drowning in memory, of being lost in things that happened, moments so long past she thought she’d forgotten them — or maybe just wished she had — until they rise up again and bury their teeth in her throat. The tremors in her hands, the inability to hold them still without making a fist, she sees now reflected in his twitching body; she hears echoes of her own fear and pain in the sounds he probably doesn’t even realise he’s making, low and ragged and broken. She visits this place so often, too often; she knows it too well.

She can’t condemn him to that. She can’t—

No-one deserves that, not even a monster.

She coughs — once, twice; she feels parched, she feels sick, she worries for a moment she won’t be able to make a sound — then blurts out the first useless thing she can think of:

“Are you going to finish your lunch or not?”

He flinches, shudders. Sandy knows that too.

Then, ever so slowly, he blinks and looks up.

She doesn’t say anything more, just watches him. Watches as the clouds start to disperse behind his eyes, leaving them clear and warm again, watches as his fingers slowly unclench, as the tension in his shoulders unwinds and unravels. Watches, with a familiarity that prickles under her skin like little lightning-bolts, as he gradually, effortfully comes back to himself.

She doesn’t understand the feeling that settles in her chest, then. The helplessness and anger she knows very well, but the pain they bring is different and new; it strikes at a place she doesn’t recognise, a place she’s never associated with him before. She aches, feeling as weak as he looks; she doesn’t know why but she can’t seem to swallow it down.

His breath catches, but only for a moment. Then it slows and grows even, settling into its familiar rattle, a pain that is purely physical and purely present: broken ribs, dehydration, hunger.

The barren lands. Where they are. And his lunch, barely half-eaten.

Sandy finds that she needs the reminder nearly as much as he does.

“Of course I’m going to finish it,” he huffs. A little shaky but convincing just the same. “Have to grab whatever scraps I can wring out of you, don’t I?”

Sandy can’t muster a smile. In this, perhaps, she is the coward, unable to pluck out the thorns lodged inside of her while he moves on, managing a shrug for himself and a grin for her.

“We need to make it last,” she tells him, swallowing thickly. “What we have is all we’ve got, and you’re...”

Something stops her, though, before she can criticise him for his soft stomach, his appetites, his inability to ration himself, to subsist on less than he’s used to, to endure, to survive, to—

No. Now is not the time. Now is not—

Pigsy, almost entirely back to himself now, is watching her. The grin is gone now, replaced by a nervous, worried frown. Bad sign, Sandy thinks, and wills her body not to tense up.

“Need some water?” he asks hesitantly.

 _Yes_ , she thinks. _Oh, yes, please, water_.

But she shakes her head because she alone understands the importance of not giving in to frivolous desires.

“We have to make it last,” she rasps, swallowing again.

“I know.” He sighs. “You keep telling me that. But you...”

Sandy closes her eyes, breathes through the discomfort and the anger.

“I can govern my own needs,” she says, only a little sharply. “All the more so right now, because I also have to govern yours.” He flinches at that, and she forces herself to soften. “I will drink amply, Pigsy, I promise, but only when I’m sure that our resources won’t run out. When we catch up with Tripitaka and Monkey, when we leave this wretched place, when we...”

“Okay,” he says, holding up his hands in mock-surrender. “Okay. Point made. Again.”

“Good.” She closes her eyes, digs her fingers into the sand to ground herself, to banish the last of the ghosts still sticking behind her eyelashes. “Because this is all we have. I don’t know when we’ll catch up with the others. For all we know they could be leagues ahead of us by now. Days, weeks, who knows? We have to—”

Pigsy coughs, cutting through her diatribe and cutting her off.

It’s not his usual cough, she notes. The kind that gasps and rings out with pain, the kind that maybe makes her worry a little bit in spite of herself. It’s a gentler, more deliberate sort of cough, peppered with warmth and lacking in threat or warning; it throws her off-balance, makes her forget what she was trying to say. Makes her turn, too, to look at him, to find him—

Smiling?

Really, truly smiling. Open and warm and bright, like he’s watching the clouds break apart and feeling the sunlight on his face for the first time after a cold, heavy rain.

Sandy narrows her eyes. “What is it?”

Pigsy’s smile gets just a little wider.

“I think,” he says, very slowly, “they’re not quite so far ahead of us as you think they are.”

And he turns, beaming, to point to the horizon.

To the distant pinpricks of two silhouettes, sun-blurred but unmistakable.

Sandy’s breath stops.

Then it starts up again in a rush, a gasp, a whimper and a whine, a plea and a prayer, a name _—_

“ _Tripitaka_!”

And for the first time in as long as she can remember, she bursts into tears of joy.

*


	10. Chapter 10

*

The sun is well past its zenith by the time they reunite with the others.

This by necessity, and certainly not for want of effort. Sandy is frenzied and feverish, desperate in a way she hasn’t felt in a long time; if it were up to her heart or her mind alone, she would have channelled her powers — never mind that there is no water here — and crossed the space between them in seconds. 

But her body is not nearly so strong as her heart and not nearly so determined as her mind; it falters in this, just as it has faltered in every other task she’s set before it, and no matter how hard she tries to run, run, run, _run_ , she is still a servant to her injured leg.

Even with two crutches, she can only move so quickly.

Pigsy manages somewhat better. He could probably make it in half the time she can, even with his broken ribs and his laboured breath, but he stubbornly refuses to leave her side. Even when she tells him to. Even when she orders him through gritted teeth to rejoin their friends as swiftly as possible so that he might bring them back to her. Even when she raises her voice and threatens to raise her fists as well, still he refuses to be moved.

“You know it’s the smart thing to do,” he says, every bit as dogged as she is. “Sticking together, I mean. What if we split up and something happened to one of us? What if you fall over and I’m not there to help you get back up? Or what if I take a turn for the worse, somewhere between here and there, and stop breathing or something. What happens then?”

Sandy scowls. “I don’t imagine I’d shed a tear for the latter.”

She doesn’t know if she’s being serious or not.

Pigsy, taking it as a harmless joke, snickers and says, “Flatterer.”

It grates on her nerves, the way he dismisses her and talks over her and calls it practicality. It gnaws on her already tattered temper, makes her even more irritable than she was before. But it also gives her an excuse to roll her eyes, and ignore him, so...

Well. Mostly ignore him, anyway.

She can’t block him out completely, not without risking serious damage. She has to pay at least some measure of attention, has to keep her thoughts in tune with his breathing, the rasping in-and-out of air in his throat and chest, the way it grinds and scrapes against his broken ribs. Because he is right about that, whether she wants to admit it or not: the risk of him ‘taking a turn for the worse’, as he puts it, is very real.

Sandy understands pain and its effects far more intimately than any of her companions, here or otherwise. She understands the kind of injuries that bloom with bruises like the ones she sees on Pigsy’s chest. She understands a great many things she wishes she didn’t, and one of the things she understands far better than she might like is that he is in considerably more pain than he wants her to know about.

He’s been maddeningly good at that. Keeping his suffering below the surface, never mentioning it unless she explicitly asks, holding it all inside unless he’s making tactless jokes to prove some point or another. For all his weaknesses in other places — he still complains about food and water every few minutes, still laments his tiredness like it’s something to be proud of — Sandy can’t help but admire him for the way he keeps his pain separate from his other less serious discomforts.

She has not shown nearly so much restraint on that count. Her leg...

Well. Small wonder that her temper is as frayed and fragile as it is.

It’s backwards. Pigsy holding his pain so easily at bay, clenching his teeth and driving himself through the worst of it so that she might not worry too much. He, who can’t even walk for half an hour without lamenting the need for food or water or rest. These complaints he makes without thought or shame, but when it comes to the very real suffering of his injuries, somehow he keeps it inside as if he feels nothing at all.

Sandy has some idea of what he’s really feeling. She knows from experience how unbearable it can be to walk or run with broken ribs, to even move the body at all much less exert it. Her own chest pulses sometimes in empathy when his breath rattles or rasps or grows raw; it doesn’t take much imagination to hear the stories he won’t tell, the ones that gurgle in every gasp, catch on every cough.

She has to work them out for herself; he doesn’t let so much as a word of it slip.

Unlike her.

She who knows better, she who _is_ better, who has experienced more pain and suffering than he will probably ever know in his immortal life. She who is perfectly equipped to keep her misery on the inside where it belongs, and yet somehow, where he smiles through his pain like it costs him nothing at all, she finds that she can barely breathe through hers.

Backwards, she thinks again, savagely now.

He walks with his back straight and his head up. She limps, moaning and choking and trying not to scream, dependant on her weapon and his to hold her from falling over. She can’t see, can’t walk, can’t do anything under her own power, and as hard as she tries she cannot keep it silent.

He has seen all of it. Every drop of her pain, every lapse in control, every shuddering breath and every drop of sweat. She doesn’t doubt that he heard at least some of her smothered sobs last night, in the few moments of consciousness between his dreams.

What has she seen of his pain? No more than what she knows by instinct and experience, what her own life’s story tells her must surely be there. If her judgement was left only to what he revealed, she might really have believed that he wasn’t suffering at all.

She wonders what he thinks of her. Does he think she’s weak for letting so much pain show while he masks his so easily? Does he think she’s strong for powering through it all, even when it’s so bad she can’t hide it?

She wonders—

No.

Why should she care what he thinks of her? He who has inflicted far worse. What does it matter if he sees her strength or her weakness, what does it matter if he is proud or ashamed?

His opinions are worth less than nothing. She won’t waste any more of her precious strength wondering about them.

Instead she focuses on the only thing that does matter: Tripitaka, silhouetted against the horizon like a guiding star.

She braces her borrowed limbs — her scythe, his rake, water and lightning and the cataclysm lashing at her nerves when they come together — and she fixes her gaze on the distant blur, and she allows herself no other thought.

Not of Pigsy, not of herself. Not of pain, his or hers.

Only him, only Tripitaka.

Like she did for all those years alone in the dark.

She focuses, she breathes.

And she limps, onward and onward and onward, thinking of nothing else but that, until there is no more strength left in her body and no more space left between them.

*

Tripitaka is delighted to see them.

And then, immediately, horrified.

He stares at them both as they stagger and stumble towards him, eyes wide and mouth gaping open; the initial flush of joy and relief is long gone by the time they actually join him, replaced by slack-jawed panic and disbelief.

He takes it all in: Pigsy’s bare, bruise-blackened chest, the blood-soaked bandages — all that remains of his shirt — pulled taut around Sandy’s legs, her drawn, pale face and his tight, discoloured jaw, the pain she wears on her sleeve because it is too much to hold down, and the pain he keeps to himself, hidden under his skin.

All of this he absorbs in what seems like a second.

“What...” His voice pitches. “How... what... how...”

Monkey, being naturally less inclined to emotional outbursts, only rolls his eyes and mutters, “Are you two capable of doing _anything_ without killing each other?”

“I didn’t kill him,” Sandy points out, pouting. “I only tried once.”

Pigsy chuckles. It’s weak and hollow-sounding, nothing like his usual easy wryness; Sandy suspects he’s making a show of amusement for Tripitaka’s sake, so that he will know it’s not as bad as it seems. Judging by the look on the little monk’s face, it doesn’t seem to be working; still, being unable to make such a gesture herself, Sandy appreciates that Pigsy at least has it in him to try.

“And to be fair,” he’s saying, with a breeziness that falls nearly as flat as his laughter, “she was pretty heavily drugged at the time.”

Tripitaka goggles some more. “You... she... _what_?”

Sandy winces. “It might take some time to explain.”

Indeed, so it does.

By unanimous agreement, they set up a makeshift camp and take a little time to convalesce. Sandy wants nothing more than to sit quietly until the pain grows dull enough to think, but of course Tripitaka doesn’t allow it. He’s anxious, practically frothing with that sweet Scholarly urge to help, and he is determined to look them over and assess their wounds.

It’s far from pleasant. He is as professional as a young monk can be, no doubt highly experienced in tending to those in need, but they are his friends and he can’t seem to keep himself from fretting and worrying. His hands are steady, and he moves with a knowing familiarity, but they are still his hands, and Sandy cannot switch off the parts of herself that flinch and recoil when he reaches over to try and examine her legs.

“Don’t,” she says, trying to pull away. “I don’t need...”

“Sandy.” His voice wavers just a little. “Not this time.”

And so, of course, she yields. Helpless, as she so often is, to the wounded look in his eyes, the sorrow that grazes the edge of pain, like he’s feeling some of hers just by being close to her. She hates it, and she hates her body for the way it resists, the way it cries out more at the gentle brushes of his fingertips as he unwinds the bindings than at the ravaged, screaming flesh he reveals underneath.

Her teeth are chattering. Her fingers dig into the loose sand, fists hidden under the surface. She watches the colour drain from Tripitaka’s face and says, for his sake, “It’s nothing.”

Monkey, watching them both from a safe, calculated distance, screws up his face. 

“That’s not nothing,” he grits out, looking a little bit green. “Seriously, you’re a god. At least, you’re supposed to be one. How in the seven hells did you even manage that?”

“We infiltrated a god prison.” Neither Monkey nor Tripitaka stop staring, so she sighs and elucidates, “It was remarkably well-built.”

Tripitaka makes a strangled, confused sound. Monkey rolls his eyes, looking no less queasy than before, and mutters, “Seriously?”

Sandy hides her face, feeling ashamed and angry at herself. She really, really doesn’t want to have to talk about it, but it seems the decision is not hers to make; misinterpreting her silence as self-consciousness, Pigsy ‘helpfully’ chimes in, “She brought the whole thing down on our heads.”

Tripitaka hastily lets go of Sandy’s injured leg. “She did _what_?”

Monkey, less impressed, sighs and says, “Of course she did.”

Sandy says nothing. 

She could try to defend herself, she supposes. Could try to explain the situation in more detail, make it clear that she was not herself at the time, but what would be the point? It’s over, the damage is done, what more is there to say about it? 

If explanations and excuses were enough to close their wounds, they would have both been healed a dozen times by now. As long as the pain still lingers, she finds she doesn’t particularly care what Monkey or Tripitaka think about its acquisition.

Tripitaka, once he gets over his initial horror, seems to share her feelings. “Never mind all that,” he says, waving away his earlier string of ‘how’s and ‘what’s. “Will it heal?”

“Yes,” Sandy says, hoping her confidence will be enough to reassure him and stop him from staring at her like that. “Once I’m able to lie down and rest it properly, it’ll mend on its own.”

Monkey nods his agreement. “Gods are tough,” he affirms, sobering a little now too. “If she’s made it this far without keeling over, she’ll be fine.” He glances back at Pigsy, eyes darkening only slightly when they fall on his bruised chest. “Him too, provided he’s not stupid enough to puncture a lung before we get out of this hellhole.”

The look on his face, suddenly grave and drawn, does not match his casual tone.

Pigsy pretends not to notice that. “Give a guy a little credit, yeah?” he quips, mustering a self-deprecating smile. “Made it this far without any bloody trouble, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, well, even idiots get lucky.” He’s still looking serious, though, and on him the expression carries extra weight; out of all of them, Monkey is the least likely to take anything serious unless absolutely necessary. “Real talk, though: neither one of you buffoons should be on your feet right now, much less running around a death-trap wasteland like this.”

“No arguments here,” Pigsy says, for once allowing himself to sound as exhausted as he must surely have been feeling for some time. “But it’s not like we had much of a choice, now, is it?”

Sandy slumps back until her head strikes the soft sand. “Sorry,” she mumbles.

“It’s okay,” Tripitaka says, shooting a hard look at Monkey. “We’ll figure it out.”

For once, Sandy ignores him. She ignores his hands, too, even when they return to her leg, practised and careful as he lays his palms over the ruined, ravaged flesh.

Let him do what he wants, she thinks miserably. She’s too tired to stop him.

Eyes closed, breathing steadily, she tries to block it all out. His hands, his voice, Pigsy and Monkey, all of it. No doubt she’ll miss some important information when they redirect the conversation to more pressing matters, but she doesn’t have the strength to care.

She’s done what she set out to do: she recovered Pigsy and brought him back to Tripitaka and to their shared quest. They’re both here, both alive and mostly in one piece, and now the quest can continue as if nothing ever happened. What more can they ask of her?

A lot, probably.

A little self-restraint, a little self-control.

She is the reason they’re like this.

The reason they’re still alive, too, but if not for her...

They should be out of here by now.

The four of them, together, as they were always supposed to be. They should be far beyond the barren lands, back among the greens and blues, the grasses and rivers, the trees and streams. They should be back among other living souls, kinder humans than the ones she remembers, people who would smile and welcome them to their homes.

They should be leagues away by now, should have left this endless wall of sand and dust and misery far behind them. They should be resting, they should be eating well, drinking well, living well and moving on with the quest. They should have done a thousand things, reached a thousand places, and there is only one reason why they haven’t.

Her.

She is parched, she is in terrible pain, and she is the reason why.

Pigsy is battered, his breathing hanging on by a thread, and Sandy—

She should have left.

Should never have let him take her place. Should have dug in her heels, back when both of her legs still worked properly, and walked away before any of them could stop her.

Too late for that now. Too late to do anything but lie in the sand and wait for the others to stop talking, or for the sun to sink low enough that they can settle in for the night, or for—

“Oi, you.”

Sandy does not open her eyes. “Go away, Pigsy.”

He doesn’t. Instead he nudges her with his boot.

“Still alive in there?”

Sandy ignores that. “After everything we’ve been through, do you really want to annoy me into breaking your neck now?”

His chuckle is low and entirely too forced. She cracks her eyes open, finds him towering over her, trying to muster a grin.

“I mean, you’re welcome to try,” he says, entirely too cheerfully. Then, without any further preamble, he drops their half-empty waterskin onto her chest. “All yours, champ.”

The soft ‘thud’ of impact reverberates, making her feel a little bit dizzy.

“Not thirsty,” she lies, and closes her eyes again. “Leave me alone now.”

“Yeah, no.” He gives her another little kick. “You said you’d drink when we found them. Which we did. You’re safe, I’m safe, and now we’ve got more supplies. So drink up.”

Another nudge, then another. Sandy shoves his foot away, and sits up with a glare. 

“How many times have I told you not to do that?” she snarls. Her throat is razed, full of jagged boulders, and she hates that he can probably hear exactly how hard it is for her to speak at all. “I don’t need you to coddle me, Pigsy. I don’t need you to tell me when I should drink. I don’t need you to—”

“Sandy.”

Not Pigsy this time, but Tripitaka. The rocks in Sandy’s throat plummet into her stomach.

He’s still fussing over her leg, cleaning and redressing the wound, keeping his touches light and careful. She can tell he’s trying to make it easier for her, but it’s not really working. The contact makes her itch on the inside, makes the ravaged flesh and muscle feel like it’s burning and infected.

Will she ever get used to it, she wonders, these little moments of compassion from the monk whose name gave her life? Such an unthinkable, frightening thing, contact intended to lessen pain rather than cause it.

“Tripitaka,” she whines, and tries to wriggle away.

He doesn’t let her escape, of course. He pauses his ministrations but he doesn’t retreat, fixing her with a steely, stoic look until she stops fidgeting; under his scrutiny and the pressure of his palms, Sandy feels like a child.

“Pigsy’s right.” His tone, condescending but with real affectionate, only makes that feeling worse. “Monkey and I have plenty of water left. Drink as much as you need.”

Sandy squirms. She doesn’t want to hear this from him any more than she did from Pigsy. “None of you understand the importance of making our resources last,” she mutters, turning her face away and staring at the horizon. “Until we’re free of this place, we can’t afford to blindly satisfy our every selfish, stupid desire.”

“No-one’s suggesting we do that,” Tripitaka says, with maddening patience. “But anyone can see you’re badly dehydrated.”

True. Hatefully, infuriatingly, upsettingly true. Sandy wants to resent Tripitaka, at least a little bit, for seeing it so easily. She can’t, though, and so she resents Pigsy instead, for being the one to bring it to his attention.

He has no right to observe her so closely, she thinks viciously. He has no right to heed her words and call her out on them in front of Tripitaka. He has no right to know any part of her at all, and certainly not to broadcast her needs to the one person in the world she doesn’t want to see this.

“Dehydrated or not,” she mutters, refusing to look at either one of them, “it doesn’t change the fact that, until we are free of this dead place, our resources are limited.”

Pigsy huffs. “She did that a lot,” he tells the others. “All ‘ration our food’ this and ‘ration our water’ that.” Sandy can feel the air shift around him, knows that he’s softening. “Kept us in one piece, she did. Made sure we’d have enough to make it back to you.”

Tripitaka nods, quietly understanding. “And you did that,” he says to Sandy. “It’s done. Okay?”

He puts his hands back on her leg, then, fingers lithe and graceful as he pulls tight a new, clean bandage. A real bandage this time, taken from their supplies, nothing like the torn-up mess of someone else’s shirt. It feels pleasant against Sandy’s skin, soft and wonderfully clean, but she resists it just as she resists the monk’s touches, just as she resists Pigsy’s offer of water.

She resists it all, as she has learned to resist every moment of kindness that finds her, before they have a chance to become something else.

“No,” she says, sitting up and folding her arms. “It won’t be okay until we’re out of here.” She’s not sure why she’s bothering, really; she knows they’ll never understand. “I know you think I’m being stubborn or needlessly frugal, perhaps even paranoid, but I’m not. I am simply trying to make sure our resources last until we are _safe_ —”

The word tears through her like a punch to the mouth. Her teeth are chattering and she can’t seem to make it stop.

Tripitaka shifts slightly away, giving her some much-needed space. “Take it easy.”

Sandy shakes her head. “This place is deadly,” she reminds him, thick-tongued and clumsy. “Our supplies were limited before we began, and now they’re diminished all the more. I’ve already squandered half our water supply in a senseless fit of anger, and there’s no guarantee it won’t happen again before we’re out of here.”

Tripitaka sighs. “Sandy—”

“You know I’m right.” Said without room for argument; she will not even allow it from him. “Every time I lose control of my emotions, I waste more. And this not counting the fact that I’ve already slowed our progress exponentially.” She clenches her teeth; it doesn’t stop the chattering. “I will not take more than I need, Tripitaka. I will _not_ —”

She stops. Turns back to find them both staring at her. Pigsy looks stricken, Tripitaka desperately sad.

“Sandy,” he says again, softer now.

“Please.” The word is a tremor, and she immediately hates herself for letting it slip. “I have wasted enough of our water, and I have wasted enough of our time. Please don’t ask me to waste more.”

Tripitaka’s grief twists into something worse, anguish and pain, like she’s struck him a physical blow. He’s got his mouth half-open, ready to argue, but Pigsy cuts him off before he can start.

“Fine,” he snaps, throwing up his hands. “You want to play it that way, knock yourself out.” He bends over until he’s at eye level, then fixes her with a look so sharp, so piercing that even Sandy shudders a bit. “But just so you know: the whole self-punishment thing? Never really works. Take it from someone who knows.”

That said, he reaches over her belly, snatches the half-empty food pouch from her belt, and stomps away with it before she has a chance to stop him.

Sandy watches him go, spitting frustration. “He doesn’t understand anything,” she growls, mostly to herself.

Tripitaka, a safe distance away now, says, very quietly, “I think he understands more than you want to admit.”

Sandy tries to ignore him. “We should—”

“Sandy.” But of course he won’t allow that. Soft and sweet and so fallibly human, he will never turn away from a lost cause; isn’t that why he let her and Pigsy join the quest in the first place? “If you won’t drink for your own comfort, will you at least do it for me? As a favour? I just...” His sigh carves a hole in her chest. “I hate to see you like this.”

Sandy swallows another growl. She is frustrated with him because he knows she can’t deny him anything and is using that as a weapon, and she is frustrated with herself for more or less the same reason. Bowed and supplicant as she is to Tripitaka — as she always has been, before they ever met — she is as helpless to his whims as an infant in the cradle, taking whatever she’s given with no other choice.

“All right,” she grumbles after a long, spite-filled moment. “But just a little.”

This, of course, is much easier said than done; once she gets a taste it’s nearly impossible to stop herself from draining the whole skin. The touch of cool water to her parched, desperate tongue is a balm so powerful it stops her breath, like the flood of pain relief after days of agony, like the feeling of falling asleep after a week of forced wakefulness. It is _wonderful_ , and she can’t even pretend that it’s not.

Loathe as she is to admit it, Pigsy was not entirely wrong when he tried to bully her into drinking: she was — _is_ — dangerously dehydrated, and this becomes all the more apparent by how hard difficult it is to keep her impulses in check. Now that they’re back among friends, now that she knows they have more available water than one solitary skin, now that they’re a little bit closer to being out of here...

She should drain the thing completely. She wants to, so badly it hurts. But the loss is her fault, and she—

No. It’s _all_ her fault. All of it.

If her throat is razed, it’s her own fault. Her loss of control, her loss of temper, her inability to hold on to her senses.

Her fault. And until she can trust herself with water in her hands...

Until she can trust herself not to turn it once again into a weapon...

Her thirst evaporates.

She shoves the skin at Tripitaka, shuddering all over. “That’s enough. I’ve had enough.”

Tripitaka sighs, but this time he doesn’t push her.

“Okay,” he says, hushed and careful, like he’s trying to coax a dangerous wild animal into letting him extract its head from a wire fence. “For now.”

Then he’s gone, leaving her alone on her back in the sand.

She lies there, listening numbly as he and Pigsy talk about her in hushed tones. Their attempt at subtlety is laughable, even if Pigsy were capable of keeping his voice down. Do they really think the desert air won’t carry their words? Have they forgotten that her hearing is just as keen as Monkey’s, or that she’s still right there, just a few paces away?

Pigsy at least makes a pretence of talking about what matters, running Tripitaka through their adventure, outlining everything that happened, explaining the details, but all his best efforts fall on deaf ears: all Tripitaka wants to know about is _them_.

Specifically, _her_.

Given her present condition, Sandy can’t say she blames him for that. Still, the way he doesn’t look at her, the way he says her name, the way he worries... it sours her stomach and makes her shudder.

“She doesn’t seem any better,” he says, in a low whisper.

Pigsy shrugs, then immediately winces. “Comes and goes,” he murmurs, touching his bruised chest. “You know how it is. Can’t expect everything to be all peachy and perfect overnight.”

Going by the look on his face, Tripitaka did expect that.

Well. Hoped for it, at least. That Sandy would have seen the light and been miraculously transformed into a creature of empathy and understanding, that her decision to bring Pigsy back would have been enough to remake her into someone new, someone capable of forgiving all his trespasses. She wishes she could give him that, but she can’t; perhaps it’s unfair of him to hope for so much so soon.

He is human, he is a monk, he was raised by the kindest, most empathic soul Sandy has ever met. Small wonder if he doesn’t understand the difference between accepting a situation and being comfortable within it. Beautiful idealist that he is, he wants so badly for everyone to just get along, to put all their past clashes and conflicts behind them and become the most intimate friends.

Pigsy wants that as well, she knows. Like her forgiveness is somehow the key to him forgiving himself.

Sandy doesn’t want to forgive him. A part of her wants to be his friend, maybe, or at least to become a good companion. Mostly, though, and above all else, she just wants it to stop hurting.

“I brought him back,” she mumbles, to both of them and to neither of them. “I kept him alive. He’ll have the chance to redeem himself of his past deeds. Isn’t that enough for one day?”

It has to be. She doesn’t have anything else left in her. She can’t give what she doesn’t have, no matter how sad Tripitaka’s eyes get, no matter how bad Pigsy’s injuries are, no matter how—

“Are you three done yapping?”

This from Monkey, blessedly oblivious as he always is to the heavier emotions of the moment.

Or, if not actually oblivious, extraordinarily talented at pretending he is.

Sandy suspects he understands rather more than he’d ever let on, whether from personal experience or simply the product of a long, well-lived life. She also knows, even if that’s true, he would sooner die than admit it aloud. He prefers a flashier approach, drawing all the attention back to himself, safer and more easily controlled than other people’s broken pieces. He tears up moments of tension with bravado and arrogance, showing all his teeth, swinging his staff, turning every dark shadow into a burst of light so blinding it can’t be ignored.

She appreciates that, more than she can say.

“I was always done,” she tells him. “They’re the ones who can’t seem to stop talking about it.”

‘It’, she says, like they don’t all know she really means herself.

Pigsy spreads his arms in a vague submissive gesture, wincing only a little when the motion aggravates his ribs. Tripitaka, realising he alone is fixated on this now, sighs and accepts defeat as well.

“I suppose we should get moving,” he concedes.

Sandy exhales her relief in a shaky gasp. No doubt he’ll corner her again before too long, insist that they talk things out, that she work through her feelings, or at least make peace with them before they hinder the quest again — and perhaps he’ll have a point, too, given how much damage she’s already done — but it is enough that he’s letting the subject drop for now. They have too many other concerns out here already; how could anyone be expected to work through their feelings in a desert wasteland with no water, no life, nothing at all?

It will be so much easier when they’re out of here, she thinks. Back where living things thrive, where their little family can thrive too, surrounded by greens and browns and blues. She is tired of yellows and whites, tired of dehydration and desperation, tired most of all of being in so much pain with nowhere to sit down and catch her breath.

She knows he’ll bring it up again. She knows, though it stings to admit, that he will be right to do so. Tripitaka is diligent and compassionate, and he will never let this slide until they’ve talked it through to the bitter end. He will push her and press her and try — even though he must surely realise now that it’s impossible — to understand her.

But by the time he does, Sandy has faith that she will once again be able to hide.

*

Monkey is very good at keeping his companions focusing on what they need to do.

He deals with Sandy in much the same way he did before, back when they still had grass under their feet and a cool, free-flowing stream nearby. Patient but in a way that pretends to be impatient, understanding without making it obvious he understands; he treats her just like he always has, like she’s little more than an annoying tag-along he never really wanted, mostly useless but a safe bet to watch his back in a fight.

She likes being treated that way. Like he sees her only as far as it affects him personally, never anything more.

It makes it easier to shut off the other parts of herself, the parts that run deep enough to drown. Helps her to be more present, to be here and now and in the barren lands, focused only on the task ahead, as they all must do if they are to get out of here.

He talks to her straight. A little simple, like he’s worried she wouldn’t understand longer words, but still straight.

He picks his moment well, waiting until they’re readying to move on. Then, just as she’s bracing herself to stand up again, he swoops in as if by coincidence, lowers his voice to a conspiratorial hush, and speaks to her like they’re equals.

It is maddeningly effective.

“Look,” he says, breezy and effortless. “If you want to keep staggering along all by yourself, go right ahead. Prove you’re tough and capable and whatever else, like anyone even cares.” He waves a hand at her discarded scythe, at Pigsy’s rake lying crossed over it. “Pick up those stupid weapons and slow us down, just to show us all you can do everything all by yourself.”

It is infuriating that he knows her well enough to call her on this, and even more infuriating that he knows precisely the tone to take to disarm her. No doubt he sees a not-dissimilar side of himself in her, proud and competitive and absolutely determined. The need to be strong enough, to be good enough, to be _enough_...

“I can do it all by myself,” she points out, rather huffily. “Did it well enough to get back to you, didn’t I?”

“Sure, sure. All hail your superior strength and stupid stubbornness.” He rolls his eyes, like he expects her to believe he wouldn’t have done precisely the same thing if their positions were reversed. “But if you’ve got any common sense rolling around in that messed-up little head of yours, you should know that I’ve got two really awesome arms—” A dramatic pause as he flexes, to underline his point and perhaps to make her smile a little bit too. “—and I’ve hauled feathers heavier than you.”

Sandy glares. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

“I would.” He flexes again, then elbows her lightly in the ribs. The contact is brief, a little snap of sharpness that somehow misses Sandy’s survival instincts; he is unnervingly good at that. “So, hey: pain or comfort, your choice. But I know which one I’d pick.”

“You’d pick pain,” Sandy points out, snorting her amusement “As you just said: to prove you can.”

Monkey laughs and flicks her forehead. As with the elbow in her ribs, as with the way he nudges her with his shoulder, as with every other kind of contact that comes from him, it has no effect on her reflexes. It doesn’t make her freeze up as it surely would from Pigsy, or panic as it would from Tripitaka. Contact from Monkey seldom does, and she can’t figure out whether it’s a particular talent of his or something deep inside herself that she doesn’t yet understand.

Either way, her only response is to poke him back, and perhaps to glower a little more.

“Okay, fine,” he’s saying. “So maybe I’d’ve picked the stupid stubborn option too. But you’re supposed to be smarter than me, aren’t you?”

“Since when?”

It’s an earnest question; she’s never received a compliment from him before.

“I don’t know. The monk seems to think so, anyway.” He shrugs, then waves it off. “Whatever. Point is, if you’re really such a genius or whatever, maybe _don’t_ follow my shining example in the whole stupid-stubbornness thing?”

Sandy laughs. Thready and weak, to be sure, but a laugh just the same.

It’s far more than she’s managed for either of the others, which possibly says some things she doesn’t want to admit. The places where she feels comfortable and secure, and the places where she doesn’t. These are not the places she would have expected — of all the places in the world to feel unsafe and scared, it hurts to realise that one of them is at Tripitakas side — and she doesn’t really know what to make of it. But the truth is there, undeniable: it is Monkey, all too eager to tell her how annoying she is, who makes her feel steady enough to laugh.

“Since you’re being so generous with your flattery,” she says, putting on airs for both their sakes, “I suppose I’ll allow it.” She sits up a bit straighter, granting him permission to move in and lift her. “But be careful, please. Too much jostling and I might as well stick to walking after all.”

He concedes the point with a knowing grimace. “Yeah, yeah. I know the drill.”

Not his first time dealing with such injuries, then, for all that he blanched to see her leg unbound. Sandy wonders if he’s endured such torments himself, or if he simply had to witness the suffering of others on the Jade Mountain. Warriors or trainees, perhaps, or else or unfortunate gods or humans who found their way to the palace in search of aid or protection. Was he their assailant, their victim, or merely a witness?

Pondering it makes her think again of Tripitaka, and of the Scholar who raised him. Both so human, both natural healers, both so eager to bind her wounds, visible and otherwise.

Touch comes so naturally to their kind. Humans, monks, healers; they see a creature in pain and feel a calling to try and help it. No matter how ragged or wretched it is, no matter how far beyond help it may seem; if there is life still within the spirit, they are there with poultices and bandages and open hands. They would let themselves be bitten a dozen times trying to save a life than shy away even once for their own comfort or safety.

Sandy has always been more inclined to bite a helping hand than receive its offerings. She doesn’t know how to accept such kindness from Tripitaka, nor did she know how to accept it from the Scholar; she would often lash out or go into hiding, when she should have yielded with grace.

The Scholar never blamed her for her reactions, no matter how scared or violent or animal-wild she became. Tripitaka is so much like him; Sandy recalls how patient he was with her wildness back at the stream, the way she yanked her hands back, the way she flinched, the way she—

It is only a little less with Monkey, but it is less.

When she nods her readiness, when he sweeps her up into his big brawny arms, it is easier for her to swallow her instincts and accept the touch for what it is: necessity born of her condition. She settles easily against his chest, a dozen different points of contact, and stifles the thrumming of her nerves before they can ignite and drive her to do something desperate or dangerous.

It’s still there, the urge to fight, to struggle, to resist. It will probably always be there, no matter who touches her and no matter why. But with Monkey, in a way she knows she would not with Tripitaka or the Scholar or anyone else, she is able to force it down and breathe.

She wants to keep her scythe close, to at least have the comfort of having her weapon in her hands but on that front Monkey leaves no room for discussion: “If you think for even one second that I’m going to let you anywhere near my sensitive areas with sharp and pointy objects...”

Given her shaky control, Sandy can’t deny it’s a fair point.

Still, she aches for the weapon, all the more so when Monkey hands it over to Tripitaka and the little monk scurries off with it before she can utter a word of protest. It makes her stomach churn, seeing it in his hands, almost more than it would have to see it in Pigsy’s. At least the god is used to holding powerful instruments; to see such a keen blade gleaming over the head of the purest soul, the purest _human_ Sandy has ever known...

She shudders so violently that Monkey has to stop mid-step and check that she’s all right.

He lets her keep her knife, so long as she keeps it sheathed at her belt, but for once the little blade is no substitute for the big one; after wandering the wasteland with her scythe as a crutch, always in hand and always ready, she feels particularly vulnerable without it. If they were caught unawares out here, if she were dropped or thrown, she would have no means of getting back up onto her feet.

She need not worry about that, of course. Monkey’s grip is strong and sure; there is no strain in his arms where he holds her, and no tension in his shoulder where she rests her head in moments of fatigue or queasiness. She feels weak, yes, and vulnerable and helpless and utterly ridiculous, but the Monkey King’s arms are as secure as any place she’s ever known and there is no danger of being thrown.

Even if demons were to attack.

Which, of course, they won’t.

She made sure of that, didn’t she?

Her mind launches her back there, to the darkness and the desperation. Water everywhere, the pressure powerful enough to bring down even a cliff imbued with god-holding magic. The drugs in her system making it worse, confusing and confounding her until she didn’t know where she was or how she’d got there. Pigsy’s face hovering in front of hers, the way he gripped her arms in his great massive hands, shaking her and shaking her and—

“Stop jostling,” she whines at Monkey.

He glares icily down at her. “I wasn’t.”

True: he wasn’t. But her thoughts are in turmoil, and without the effort of walking, of chasing the distant horizon, of keeping herself upright, she has no means of distracting herself to try and keep them in check.

So she fidgets and squirms and makes his job more difficult than it ought to be, and he grumbles and sighs and occasionally jostles her on purpose, just to give her something to complain about. And it’s not exactly terrible, but it’s not really comfortable either, and her leg doesn’t hurt any less for being not so much in use.

They make good time, at least.

Sandy has been crawling and limping and stumbling for so long, she’d almost entirely forgotten what it feels like to make real, meaningful progress. By the time the sun is low enough to kiss the top of the sand, she guesses they’ve probably crossed a good few leagues since their reunion, more ground than she and Pigsy could have covered in a full day or more. Their footprints — all except her own — meander behind them in a serpentine trail, all the way back to the distant, darkening horizon.

She keeps her eyes on the one behind them rather than the one still so far ahead. It’s more comforting, at least to her eyes, to watch the space at their backs grow than it is to measure the emptiness still to cross. There is so much still to do, so far yet to travel. Her head throbs with fatigue, and her throat burns with the need for water she cannot and will not ask for.

Some distance behind, Pigsy brings up the rear. Panting, gasping, exhausted, and occasionally struggling simply to breathe, he is a sorry sight and a sorrier sound. Sandy tries without success to block out the strangled noises he’s making, the evidence of his pain and the danger rattling loosely around his lungs.

She can see by the look on Tripitaka’s face, tight with worry as he falls back to keep pace with him, that he knows what it means just as well. He has already proven himself well versed in treating gruesome injuries; Sandy quakes to think what others he must have seen and healed in his young life.

Still, for all the horrors he must have witnessed, it doesn’t seem to stop him from sleeping soundly at night. Still, for all he must have seen and done, both at the monastery and after its destruction, he is able to find a smile now, with little effort, as he stretches up and squeezes Pigsy’s shoulder.

“We’ll stop soon,” he promises.

Pigsy finds a smile too, stronger than anything he ever managed for Sandy. “No worries,” he says, and turns his face away in hopes that the little human won’t catch the lie.

Tripitaka squeezes his shoulder again.

The contact is so effortless between them. The sight of it is alone is enough to make Sandy’s chest tighten with panic, horror, pain. But neither of them seem to think anything of it at all.

Contact, comfort, compassion, kindness.

These things come so easily to them both.

Sandy doesn’t understand. She doesn’t—

No.

She won’t think about it.

She can’t—

She can’t look at the two of them together. She can’t look at the points of contact between them, easy and comfortable and sweet. Pigsy, with that tight, strained expression on his face, the way it grows less when Tripitaka smiles. Tripitaka, pressing his fingertips into his skin, offering companionship through contact, the kinds of thoughtless, human touches that Sandy cannot accept, the kind that would make her body respond in the most brutal, terrible ways.

She can’t look at them and see how well they fit together. Their simple words, given and received like they mean nothing more than what they say. Their simple touches, offered and accepted like there is no threat of pain, of fear, of violence, like there is no danger in any of these things they do so thoughtlessly, so carelessly, so—

She cannot associate him, Pigsy, with him, Tripitaka. She cannot look at the monk whose name she wears wrapped around her heart and see him smiling up at the god-monster who drove her to some of her darkest, most desolate, desperate places, who made her suffer to survive so that he might thrive. She cannot see them together, both of them looking at her and pretending not to, and imagine that their names might one day hold the same meaning, that they will both be synonymous with ‘family’.

They are. At least, they should be.

She knows this.

But they could not be more different.

One kept her alive for all those years.

The other made her wish she wasn’t.

They’re not—

They cannot—

 _No_.

She closes her eyes, buries her face in Monkey’s chest, and waits for ‘soon’.

*

Soon — by someone’s definition, but certainly not Sandy’s — they do stop.

When the sun is almost below the horizon, sinking lower and lower with each passing moment. When even Monkey’s steps aren’t as sure as they once were, when he begins to jostle her not out of playfulness or retaliation but by genuine accident. When Sandy is too tired to give him a hard time about it, to complain or fidget or or do much of anything at all.

They’ve closed another few leagues by the time they make camp for the night. Made enough progress that the horizon, when the setting sun strikes it just so, seems to shimmer in colours other than yellow or white. Enough that, if she closes her eyes and focuses with every ounce of power she has, Sandy thinks she might be able to taste the distant trickle of fresh, clean water.

Real water. Distant, still so far away it hurts, but there.

She thinks.

She hopes.

Monkey’s chipper mood seems to confirm it. Usually he’s the first to complain when they stop for any reason but he seems almost exuberant this time, setting her down with a playful bump and nudging her shoulder a little. 

“Funny how quickly it goes,” he remarks, “when you’re not hobbling around on a busted-up leg.”

Sandy rolls her eyes, elbowing him back. “Just glad to be back on solid ground,” she quips back.

Tripitaka is equally pleased. His optimism, unlike Monkey’s, is entirely characteristic; Sandy would expect nothing less from the monk who thrives so much on hope and faith, even in the unworthy.

“If we set a good pace,” he says, with a lopsided grin, “maybe we can get out of here tomorrow.”

They spend the evening meal ruminating over their route, mapping out how far they’ve come and how far they still have left to go. Sandy is surprised by how much ground they’ve covered, even separated and then wounded. 

It is particularly difficult for her to gauge distance in a place like this, featureless and barren and with no water to measure by; since their separation, she has led their course mainly by memory — a patchy, unreliable thing even on a good day — and the arc of the sun... and, occasionally, by delirium, disorientation, and dumb luck.

It is a comfort nearly beyond words to be back in the company of those who know better, who have maps and knowledge at their disposal and who know how to guide them out of this place. It is a comfort beyond even that, to study the horizon and know that she will soon be able to hear the familiar voices of the rivers and seas. 

It is a comfort too, albeit of a different kind, to eat a meal that wasn’t stolen from the mouths of drowned demons.

Sandy eats little, still feeling nauseous and miserable from pain and dehydration, but what she does eat actually stays down. A small victory, to be sure, but it’s enough of one that she actually feels a little bit stronger when she sets her plate aside and flops onto her back.

Pigsy also eats sparingly. A strange choice, Sandy thinks, considering how vocal he was earlier in reminding her that they’re back among the rest of their supplies; still, when she tries to question him about it, he only shrugs and flashes a wry, unconvincing grin.

“Got used to your crazy diet plan by now, haven’t I?”

She doesn’t press him further. Perhaps she should — it is uncharacteristic enough that even the usually self-obsessed Monkey is raising his brows — but she’s tired and queasy and in excruciating pain, and the last thing she wants, now that she no longer needs to keep him alive, is to spend any more time than necessary fussing over his habits.

Besides, if her influence has caused him to be more frugal in his appetites, she’ll consider it a triumph.

She keeps to herself, quiet and broody, as they settle down to sleep, Pigsy and Tripitaka wrapping themselves up in heavy blankets while Monkey takes up position to stand watch. It’s rather pointless out here in a wasteland whose only demon occupants are already dead, but that doesn’t stop him from doing it anyway.

“Someone’s got to keep you idiots safe,” he points out, rather self-importantly. “Since you clearly can’t do the job for yourselves.”

Sandy, not wanting to bring up all the unpleasant reasons why he’s wrong about that, only scowls and goes back to fiddling with her new bandages. Far from the crisp, clean fabric that Tripitaka worked so diligently with, they’re stained now with sweat and sand and blood; underneath the crumpled material, her leg throbs.

She doesn’t fall asleep. The pain is too intense to let her relax for more than a moment or two at a time, jolting her back to full alertness as it did last night every time she begins to drift. She feels sick, sullen, and sorry for herself, and the unending desert cold is not helping at all. She can already tell that this night will pass in much the same miserable manner as the previous one did: slowly and unendingly, counting down the hours through the rhythm of her companions’ breath or the murmurs of their dreams.

Another night listening to Pigsy’s voice rise and fall, the grunts and the growls and—

And the other thing.

The fear, the grief, the humiliation. His whimpers and his whines, cowering and cringing and pleading, letting out in sleep — as he wasn’t allowed to do when it mattered — the part of him that does care, that does feel, that maybe really was terrified.

She doesn’t want to hear it again. She doesn’t want to hear the softer feelings that hid behind the brutality, she doesn’t want to have to wonder if maybe she feels something less than brutal too.

She doesn’t want to—

“Can’t get to sleep?”

Sandy screws her eyes shut. “Actually I’ve been asleep for hours,” she mutters, clenching her jaw to keep it steady, to keep her voice steady too. “Goodnight, Tripitaka.”

It doesn’t work. The sand shifts slightly as the little monk settles down beside her, exhaling a soft, sympathetic sigh.

“Is your leg bothering you?”

“No.” Lights burst behind her eyes as she tries to shut them even more tightly. She gives up, opens them, and gazes up into Tripitaka’s eager, open face. Impossible to lie to him, impossible to even try, and so she sighs as well, and admits: “A little, maybe.”

“I thought so. You’ve got the same look on your face the Scholar used to get when he had one of his headaches.” The memory seems to strike a blow; his eyes grow damp, grief catching the moonlight above, precious water sprinkled with salt. He looks so sad, so much in need of contact and comfort, it’s not a surprise when he follows with, “Can I touch you now? Or is that still...”

Sandy swallows hard. “It’s still.” Then, with some reluctance, because she wants so desperately to be what he needs, “But you can, if you like.”

“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” So, instead, he scoots back a little, giving her some more space. The distance is infinitely more touching than any contact would have been, even if a part of her wishes she could have accepted it for his sake. “I just wondered if I could help at all? You know, to lessen the pain, or make it more bearable or something?”

Sandy tries to laugh, but her throat is too raw. “Are you a magician as well as a monk?”

“Well, maybe a little bit.” He says it lightly, sort of teasing and gentle, but his soft, sweet smile still makes her insides squirm. “Here. Try this.”

And he fishes a handful of crumpled leaves out of his belt pouch.

Sandy peers at them, squinting a little in the darkness. Dried and carefully preserved, they have little more colour to them than the rest of the barren lands. She doesn’t immediately recognise them, but then she wouldn’t expect to; she knows so little of natural life beyond the waters, after all. Lichens, she knows well enough, and the mould and muck of the sewers. But real plants, the kind that thrive under the sun’s nurturing light?

So she asks, taking no shame in her ignorance, “Is that dead or alive?”

Tripitaka stares at her for a beat or two. Then he laughs, saying her name with such fondness, such impossible warmth that it makes Sandy’s stomach lurch. Sickly-sweet, precious and rich, she doesn’t know how to digest it, and her body doesn’t know whether to choke it down or cough it up.

“It’s pain relief,” he explains gently. “And it should help you to sleep.”

Something in the way he says that, the word _sleep_ echoing ominously inside her head, makes Sandy feel unsafe. 

“How do you mean?” she asks uneasily. “Help because the pain will be less? Or help because it’ll make me...”

She doesn’t finish. Her throat constricts, cutting off her voice as it remembers the demons’ drugs, how swiftly they wormed their way into her system and then into her mind, how easily they confused and disoriented her.

She remembers the fear that came first, then the dizziness that could have come from breathlessness or panic. She remembers Pigsy’s face filling her field of vision, remembers being so sure that he was her enemy, so certain that he wanted to hurt her, use her, kill her. She remembers the taste of water, tepid and stagnant but all hers, remembers feeling the violence rising up in her, instinct and reflex and the need to escape. She remembers the way her mind twisted, telling her to kill every demon, every monster, everyone who would ever try and hurt her, to drown them and destroy them and run, hide, disappear, _survive_ —

“Sandy?” Tripitaka, bringing her back to the present. He’s closer now, reaching for her shoulder like he can’t help himself. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” She wrenches away before he can try to touch, taking her head in her hands and squeezing until her temples hurt. “I don’t need your drug.”

“It’s not a drug.” He’s frowning when she peeks up at him, clearly puzzled. “It’s just a herb.”

As if there’s any practical difference, Sandy thinks, and shakes her head. “You say it’ll make me sleep,” she says. “Will it affect my thoughts as well? Confuse me? Hinder my control?”

“I’m not...” He furrows his brow, clearly puzzled. “It’s harmless. I don’t know what it is you’re worried about, Sandy, but I promise you it won’t do you any harm. It’s just a painkiller, and a sleep aid.”

He holds the stuff out again, and Sandy cringes, already tasting its bitter venom. She is frightened, she realises, terrified of what might happen if her guard is taken down again, if she lets some other substance into her system. If there’s even the slightest chance of her losing control while not completely and entirely herself—

She shakes her head. “I don’t want anything that will affect my mind.”

Tripitaka looks sad. She can tell he doesn’t understand why this is so important to her. “Sandy, I...”

“Tripitaka.” She sighs. “My grip on reality is tenuous enough as it is. It doesn’t need any more help.”

His expression softens, but only a little. “Is it not possible,” he asks slowly, “that it’s tenuous because you’ve not been able to get the rest you need? Maybe if you slept...”

Sandy snarls. She can’t help herself; even at Tripitaka, she snarls.

“Oh, I have slept,” she spits. “I slept, drugged and alone, in that demon prison. In the dark, in the belly of that awful place, their gods’ tomb with its walls strong enough to crush us to death. I slept there, because they forced me to sleep there, and then I lost control of myself and I drowned every one of them.” She gestures angrily at her leg, then waves at Pigsy’s snoring form. “I did this to us. Brought the whole place down on our heads. Because they made me _sleep_.”

Tripitaka’s expression twists. No longer merely sad, now he looks utterly heartbroken.

“It’s not like that now,” he says. “You’re safe. You’re back among your friends, you—”

“ _He_ is my friend,” Sandy says, pointing at Pigsy again. “At least, he’s supposed to be, yes? Friends or companions or whatever else you call it. But I still can’t breathe sometimes, for how desperately I want to do him harm. How desperately I want to...” She thinks of closing her eyes again, but the darker black is more frightening than the anguished look on Tripitaka’s face. “Even when I was keeping him alive. Even when I was bringing him back to your side, back to the quest. Even _now_ , Tripitaka, I want to do the most unspeakable things to him, and I can’t...” Her fists are spasming again; she wills them to crack open. “I can’t make that feeling go away.”

“I know.” He starts to reach for her again, then stops himself. “I understand, Sandy. I really do.”

Perhaps. But if he does, he understands it from the safe, secure distance of one who doesn’t have to feel it, who hasn’t had to live his life with those awful visions constantly playing out inside his head. Empathy is a beautiful thing, terrifying to someone like Sandy, but it has its limits. He may understand, but he will never truly know.

“It’s a problem,” Sandy says slowly. “You know this already. I’ve wasted our resources because of it. I’ve already caused him pain, and myself as well. I can’t...” Her voice cracks; she resists the urge to ask for water, however badly her razed throat needs it. “I’ve tried to understand him. I’ve tried to empathise, to show the kind of compassion you and the Scholar would want me to. But I can’t do it. I _can’t_. And until I can, I can’t afford to have my senses inhibited. Even among ‘friends’.”

 _Especially among friends,_ she doesn’t add, because he certainly wouldn’t understand that.

He understands enough, at least, that he doesn’t argue. “I just want you to not be in pain.”

“So do I,” Sandy says, letting her voice shake as much as it wants, letting herself sound and look exactly as tired as she is. “I would like that very much.” She eyes the leaves again, colourless and supposedly harmless, then wearily shakes her head. “But not like that. Not until I know it won’t...”

Finally, exhausted, she does close her eyes again. Listens, miserable and in pain, as Tripitaka slips the leaves back into his pouch.

“Okay,” he concedes at last; the quaver in his voice says he wants to support her in this but he doesn’t. He can’t argue, he knows that much, but Sandy can tell that he doesn’t really agree with her either. He would sacrifice almost anything for an end to pain, even at the cost of other things. “You made it back to us without help. I’m sure one more night won’t do you any harm.”

“Mm.” She breathes slowly, steadily. Takes hold of as much of the misery as she can and balls it up tight inside her head. “Pain is a companion I know very well, Tripitaka. So well, in fact, that I sometimes feel strange without it.” She doubts that will comfort him, but it does her. “It is less frightening than the other thing. At least, it is to me. I understand that it might not seem that way to you.”

Tripitaka considers this for a short while. Then, very hesitantly, he says, “I see.”

Sandy smiles at that, just slightly. “You don’t. But I appreciate you trying.”

They both fall quiet then, for too short a while, side by side and rather too close for Sandy to be comfortable. Still, Tripitaka’s smooth, untroubled breathing is a refreshing change from Pigsy’s gurgles and gasps and groans, the dangerous sound of his ribs rattling in his chest. A refreshing change to have a companion who worries about her, rather than one she must—

No. She does not _worry_ about Pigsy.

That would mean she cares. 

Even just a little, even the tiniest bit.

It would mean—

She doesn’t know. And she’s not sure she wants to.

It makes her feel scared and untethered, even just trying to put a name to what she feels, the clashing of two very different struggles inside of her: to keep him alive, and to squash her own desire to kill him.

And Tripitaka wants her inhibitions lowered further?

This in the name of a little pain relief? A little sleep?

She might laugh, cold and strained, if she weren’t so flattered, awed by the idea that he might cares so much.

“I won’t touch you,” he says to her, after a long, weighted silence. “But would it be okay if I stay close to you tonight?”

Sandy blinks her eyes open. It takes them a few seconds to focus, even in the dark where they should be the most comfortable.

“Why?”

His shrug is tense, a little stiff. The kind of shrug that is almost certainly hiding something. “Monkey thrashes around,” he explains, a little too hastily. “And Pigsy snores. You’re the most peaceful option.”

Sandy snorts at that, genuinely amused in spite of herself. “Never been called that before. ‘Peaceful’.”

She’s not sure she likes it. But she keeps that part to herself.

Tripitaka ignores her. “Besides,” he presses, “wouldn’t you rest easier with me close to you? If you’re so afraid of losing control again, I mean. We both know that I... I mean, that my name means a lot to you. Wouldn’t it help you to stay focused if you could just glance over your shoulder and see me there? Help you to remember where you are and why you’re here. You know? All the things the Scholar told you...”

He trails off.

No matter, he’s made his point.

Sandy mulls it over.

“You wouldn’t get too close?” she asks, after a long, contemplative moment. Her breathing is rapid and shallow; she doesn’t want to think about all the reasons why this is a terrifying idea. “No touching at all?”

“Not unless you want me to.” He holds out a hand, so she can see he couldn’t reach her even if he tried. “I promise.”

Sandy stares at his open palm, his slender, feminine fingers. She studies his face, also slender, also feminine, and the eager warmth in his eyes. Whatever he may claim about Monkey and Pigsy’s sleeping habits, she can tell he really wants to be close because he’s worried about her. Because she is broadcasting her pain and he knows that she would turn down any comfort except this: closeness, as much of it as she is able to bear, from he whose name is a balm to even the worst of her wounds.

So he thinks, anyway.

Sandy’s not sure she feels the same way. For him, no doubt, there is something reassuring in being close enough to check her breathing, her eyes, examine whatever part of her he wanted to ensure she was well. But for herself?

Just thinking of it makes her start to panic, claustrophobia swelling even under the open sky. To drop her guard with another soul so near is a terror of a thing. There are a thousand pains waiting there, in the press of bodies and hands.

“I don’t know.” She sounds hoarse and shaky. She tries to pull herself together, reminds herself that there’s no reason to still feel this way, trapped and vulnerable, that he is right about that: she is among friends. “I mean, of course, if you like.”

Tripitaka studies her, expression unreadable; no doubt he can tell the concession is for him and not herself.

She wonders what he sees when he looks at her. Her face too pale, her hands shaking in the sand, her maimed and bandaged leg. He looks at her so closely, so intimately, like he’s taking in every part of her, trying to piece together the workings of the mind by analysing the body.

Sandy could tell him that such an attempt will prove fruitless; she seldom understands her own mind most of the time, so what chance could a mere human have?

Even that human.

Still, he must see something, because his features grow suddenly clear, darkening with a kind of recognition. It is a devastating, horrifying thing, to be recognised and known, but Sandy doesn’t have the chance to flinch from it; Tripitaka leans away, freeing her at last from the cage of his scrutiny, and when he speaks again it’s with the weighted reverence of someone who has uncovered some new piece of a mystery.

“I’m sorry,” he says, very slowly, “that you’re in so much pain.”

Sandy touches her mutilated leg, feeling it scream. “It’ll heal.”

It’s not until much later, when Tripitaka’s breathing has slowed and grown even, when Sandy alone is still awake, biting down on her tongue and her sleeve to muffle her wails, that she realises he might have been talking about a different pain entirely.

*


	11. Chapter 11

*

Morning brings peace, quiet, and the unmistakable certainty that something is very wrong.

Sandy doesn’t immediately know what, or why or how or anything else; she barely even knows where she is. She’s tired, sore, and uncomfortable, her thoughts too sluggish to twist into cohesion, and though she hasn’t really slept any more than she did last night, still it takes some time to adjust to the arduous, agonising task of sitting up and stretching her aching body.

Her leg hurts. Her head does as well, the dull rhythmic pounding of exhaustion settling like a blindfold behind her eyes. The world around her, still hazy as the sun begins to crawl over the horizon, seems out of focus somehow, like the aftermath of a blow to the head. She feels disconnected, and she lacks the strength to put herself back together.

It is the space between her body and her nerves: there lies the disconnect. The body is slow and senseless, the nerves as sharp and clean as razors. Keen, like they get when she senses an attack. Her body lacks the strength or awareness to react, but that doesn’t change what her nerves, her senses, her instincts are insisting is true:

Something is very, _very_ wrong.

She blinks a couple of times, massaging her temples, trying to goad her mind into working. Looks around, but finds nothing immediately unexpected.

Monkey, rummaging irritably through their things, grumbling to himself about food, about water, about the hope that they will finally be free today from the barren lands. Tripitaka, fussing over a tear in his robes, knotting and unknotting the fabric with a compulsive sort of nervousness, like he thinks there’s something underneath that he needs to hide. Pigsy, flat on his back, still asleep, slumbering silently—

Sandy’s stomach lurches, hard.

She sits up a little bit straighter.

“Pigsy?”

The only response is from Monkey, who cocks his head to frown at her. “Let the idiot sleep,” he gripes. “The longer he’s out, the more peace and quiet for the rest of us.”

Sandy shakes her head, growing frantic. The kicking in her stomach is rhythmic now, a series visceral little strikes that mirror her pulse: fast and frenetic, tasting of panic.

“He’s too silent,” she gurgles, realising the importance of that only after it’s out. “He’s too—”

Reflex makes her try to jump up, to scramble to his side and check that he’s still breathing. Reflex makes her ribs contract to squeeze her lungs, her heart, her everything; reflex launches the panic from her belly up into her mouth, into a cry, into a shout, into a—

She tries to move, to run to him, to do anything at all, but of course she can’t; her legs betray her before she even makes it halfway up off the ground.

Her left leg gives out, as useless and crippled as it has been since he dug it out. For an excruciating second she feels no sensation at all, only a blinding numbness, then the pain tears through her whole body all at once and the air vanishes from her lungs. In the blink of an eye she’s curled up on her side, choking on her breath, swallowing down scream after scream and sob after sob.

“Sandy!” Tripitaka, already crouched frantically at her side. “Sandy, are you—”

“Not me,” Sandy grits out, clogged with tears. “ _Him_.”

Tripitaka blinks. Then realisation hits and he blanches deathly pale. “Oh, no...”

There’s nothing Sandy can do, then, but lie there, curled up on her side as the world lurches and spins, water and salt blurring her vision as the pain in her leg leaves her helpless. Nothing she can do but listen, or try to listen through the ragged gurgle of her own wails, while the others do what she should have done herself, what she has been trying to do this whole time, what she has fought demons, deserts, dehydration, even her own instincts to do:

 _Keep him alive_.

She hears Tripitaka calling his name over and over and over, his voice rising higher, sounding so young, so small, so scared. _Pigsy, can you hear me? Pigsy, are you awake? Pigsy, are you okay? Pigsypigsypigsypigsy—_

She hears Monkey too, in a voice riddled with gravel, barking that it’s not funny, that if Pigsy knows what’s good for him he’ll stop fooling around and open his eyes, open them now, _please just open your stupid eyes_ —

She hears fractured pieces of conversation, half-sentences, half-spoken half-thoughts, nonsense. She hears words she’s sure she knows but can’t make any sense of — ‘rib’ and ‘lung’, ‘broken’ and ‘breathing’ and ‘bad’ — things she should know, things she does know, things that make no sense and also make entirely too much sense, and she hears motion, contact, the ripping of fabric and the slapping of skin, heavy breathing and choking and—

 _You did this_ , she thinks numbly, at herself. _Just like you always said you would, just like you always wanted. You killed him, you killed him, you—_

She tries, again, to stand. Makes it up onto her knees this time, before the pain hits and throws her back down.

Breathless, desperate, she thinks she hears the now-familiar rattle of his breathing, thinks she hears his voice choking out words, but she can’t—

Her own voice, she can definitely hear. A scream, a sob, a convulsion caught in her throat, and then—

“Sandy, just stay down!”

 _Tripitaka_. At least, she thinks it is. 

His voice is still high and squeaky, but firmer now and stronger than it was a moment ago. The tremors that were there before have mostly steadied, and that more than anything else helps Sandy to recover her own breath, to slow her thundering heart, to swallow the remaining panic and let common sense take over.

She does as she’s told. She stays down, she breathes, she listens.

Helpless and hobbled and half-blind with pain, it’s all she can do.

“—needs help.” That’s definitely Monkey. Also steadier now, but not quite as much as Tripitaka. Sandy doesn’t know whether to be comforted by that or more frightened. “And I don’t mean from one of us. Idiot needs a healer.”

Sandy’s stomach turns upside-down. She thinks she’s going to be sick, but then she hears Pigsy’s voice — definitely him this time, though she’s never heard him sound so small or so weak — and every muscle in her body unclenches with a relief so profound and unexpected that it takes her whole self to focus on processing it.

“You’re being dramatic,” he’s muttering, the words cut off by a cough so violent it seems to tear him up from the inside. Ragged and wet-sounding, Sandy doesn’t need to see him to know that there’s blood somewhere between his chest and his mouth. “Just overslept a bit, that’s all.”

Monkey makes a low, anguished noise. “I had to bring you back, you big lug.”

Sandy lifts her head, squints through the blur of tears and immediately wishes she hadn’t. It is a rare and terrifying thing, to see the great and arrogant Monkey King so solemn. His expression is grave, his eyes glittering onyx, and the tension in his jaw makes it clear that he will not be coerced into taking this lightly. From him, more than anyone, that means it’s serious.

Tripitaka, looking similarly haunted, rests a hand on his arm and says, “Take it easy, Monkey.”

Monkey wrenches free, a burst of violent anger that Sandy recognises entirely too well.

“We’re way past that, monk,” he spits, then locks eyes with Pigsy, still prone and barely moving. “Did you hear me, you oversized meatball? I had to bring you _back_. Like, from _nothing_. Don’t try and play it tough. It doesn’t suit you like half as well as it does us.”

 _Us_.

He means himself, obviously, but it takes Sandy a moment to realise he’s talking about her as well. That this is another part of what he sees in her: the ever-present need to be seen as tough or strong or capable.

Does he understand, she wonders, that in her it comes from a place of survival? That she is not really like him at all, with his flexing muscles, showing off for fun and status and power? That showing weakness for her means death, that showing strength was the only way to stay alive? Does he realise that it is not bravado in her, as it is for him, as it would be for Pigsy, if he could pull it off half so well, that for her the need to push past her pain and ‘play it tough’ was the only thing that kept her out of the grave?

Irrelevant, she thinks, sluggishly realising the other part.

 _I had to bring you back,_ Monkey said. _Like, from nothing_.

Sandy’s body seizes up again. “You—”

But her teeth are chattering too hard to get out more than the one syllable.

Not that it matters; the others have far more pressing matters to deal with than listening to her babble.

“You need help,” Tripitaka says to Pigsy, echoing Monkey’s insistence. “Urgently.”

Pigsy makes a noise that Sandy guesses is supposed to be a sigh. If he’s trying to reassure them that they’re overreacting, it has rather the opposite effect: more than just ragged now, his every breath is shot through with strain and thick with blood. He sounds like he’s halfway into the grave, like perhaps Monkey didn’t bring him all the way back after all.

Like maybe he really was—

Sandy clutches her head in her hands and tries not to scream.

It all becomes a blur, then, an incoherent mass of noise and colour, like the staticky buzz that fills her head sometimes on the really awful days. Garbled, disjointed, a maelstrom of madness; she can’t make out what they’re saying any more, or what’s going on, or anything at all. He could be dying again for all she knows, and the shrill screech echoing in her ears could be Tripitaka’s pleas or Monkey’s curses, or her own wailing.

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t—

And then, snapping her back to herself, she’s being hauled upright.

Strong, powerful hands sitting her down, holding her until she is still.

Must be Monkey, she thinks dimly. He’s the only one that can touch her without awakening her survival instincts, without making her body respond with violence or with fear.

She squints up, finds his blurry face. “Is he alive?”

“For now.” He’s not smiling, and there is no gentleness at all in the way his fingers squeeze her biceps. “Listen. Zoned out or not, you’re smart enough to know what’s going on. He needs a healer, and fast.”

Sandy has guessed that part, yes. But...

“We’re leagues away from civilisation.”

Monkey sighs, frustrated and helpless.

“Yeah, we are. And with our fastest runner down a leg and a half.” He still doesn’t smile, but he does bump her shoulder, clearly trying to hold on to some small bit of levity for both their sakes. “Look, we both know I can do it. Couple of hours, full speed, I can get him somewhere they can fix him up. No problem. But not if I...”

He trails off with a grimace, glancing unsubtly at her leg.

The message is clear. He doesn’t need to say the words.

Sandy grants him the reprieve of saying them on his behalf: “You can’t carry both of us.”

“Right.” He clears his throat, then, feigning offence because it’s easier than admitting weakness. “I mean, I _could_ , obviously. But I don’t have that many arms.”

Sandy tries to laugh. It catches in her throat, drowned by salt. “Take him, then,” she says, without hesitation. “Tripitaka and I will catch up.”

Monkey’s features go slack with relief, his shoulders swiftly following suit. That’s what he wanted to hear, Sandy can tell, what he needed her to be the one to say, to clear his conscience and the path ahead.

He couldn’t make the demand himself. Couldn’t throw all that weight back onto her shoulders, order her to climb back up onto her ruined leg and stagger through the desert on it again. Necessary though it is, for all that he claims she annoys him, he could not inflict that pain himself; she had to offer, had to show willingness; now that she has, his task is easier and his path is clear.

Still, because he is so much softer than he pretends to be, he asks, “You sure you’re up for it?”

They both know the answer: that she must, that they have no other choice, that Pigsy’s life may very well depend on it.

“You said it yourself, yes?” Sandy says, swallowing hard. “I need to prove that I’m still tough.”

Finally, possibly a little bit in spite of himself, he smiles.

“Knew you were more than just dead weight,” he quips, and Sandy lets herself pretend that she believes him. “Don’t push yourself too hard, okay? We all know you’re tough and strong and whatever else, but for the love of whatever, pace yourself out there.” He glances back over his shoulder; Sandy follows his gaze to where Tripitaka is still crouching over Pigsy’s unmoving form. “For the monk’s sake, yeah?”

Sandy tilts her head, acknowledging and understanding. “I will,” she promises, and she might even mean it. “I know how to survive.”

This he knows is true. Whether he believes she will pace herself or not, he knows that she will survive, and that she will make sure Tripitaka does too. It is a weight off his mind, she can tell, to know that the little human is in safe hands.

The smile widens, cracking into a grin, a mark of his real gratitude.

“Atta girl,” he says. “Guess I’ll leave this hunk of junk with you, then.”

And he sets Pigsy’s rake down in front of her, like he expects her to believe she’s doing him a favour by keeping guard over the thing, like he doesn’t know she’ll never be able to stand without its support. 

Sandy plays along. “I’ll guard it well.”

“You’d better.” He winks, faux-conspiratorial. “You know how particular the big lug can get about his stuff.”

Sandy nods, takes a deep steadying breath, then leans up to swat him on the forehead before he has the chance to do the same to her. Letting him know, in their unique language of teasing give-and-take, that he has nothing to worry about, no reason to think of her at all once he leaves here. Reminding him, and herself a little bit as well, that she isn’t just making a show of toughness, she really is tough.

Perhaps he never doubted it. Perhaps he did. Either way, he seems to appreciate the gesture; his grin grows a little more comfortable, fitting his face a little better, and he gives her one last playful nudge before speeding back to Pigsy’s side.

Sandy has never seen him move so fast, nor with such purpose. His urgency is contagious; it seethes in her stomach, mixing with the pain-nausea, the panic, the dozen little discomforts already churning inside of her. She has no idea how she’ll manage to get back up to her feet, much less walk.

She closes her eyes. Tries to block out the noise and chaos around her, to centre herself by remembering all those times she had no other choice. Tries to remember that she now holds responsibility for Tripitaka’s well-being, that if she lets down Monkey or herself she will also let down the monk.

And the Scholar.

And every precious, life-saving moment she held close for all those years. Waiting there in the dark, alone, wrapped up in the Scholar’s words in lieu of real warmth, waiting and waiting and waiting for Tripitaka to appear, for a reason to keep surviving, a reason to keep trying, to keep _wanting_ —

So many times his name brought her back from the edge of despair. So many times she wished she could just lie down in the dirt and stop breathing. But his name, every time, brought her back from the brink, hauled her up onto her knees and then onto her feet.

It will do the same again now.

She will stand. She will walk. She will get Tripitaka through the barren lands, and herself as well, and she will—

She will not let herself think of Pigsy at all.

She will not let herself picture him lying there, still and lifeless and possibly not breathing.

She will not let herself remember that it is her fault.

She will block out the acid-tongued whispers inside her head, the ones telling her over and over again that she wanted this, that she dreamed of it, that her mind has been filled with visions of vengeance from the moment they met, strangers and enemies all those years ago.

She will not listen to the clash of feelings inside her head, guilt and relief and panic and—

She will not feel anything.

Not until she’s out of here.

She empties her mind as best she can, she breathes, she braces. She takes their weapons in her hands, his rake and her scythe, and plants them both in the sand. Water on one side and lightning on the other, twin powers pulling at her from below the ground and above the sky. Both beautiful, both deadly, both powerful enough to destroy a human, a demon, even a god.

Both hers, for now.

She takes a deep breath, whispers a silent prayer for strength and for control, and drags herself up to her feet.

“Go,” she says to Monkey. “Get him the help he needs.”

He nods, sets his jaw, then scoops Pigsy up into his arms like he weighs nothing at all, and breaks into a run.

*

It’s fortunate that Monkey said ‘for the monk’s sake’, because without Tripitaka there Sandy would most certainly run herself into the ground.

With a human under her protection — with that specific human under her protection — she has no choice but to show restraint. She has to keep at least a little bit of her strength in reserve, for fear of falling into trouble and being unable to keep him safe.

Just as Monkey said, it is for Tripitaka’s and not her own that she tries to pace herself.

Tries.

It is much more difficult, trying to walk slowly than trying to walk swiftly. To suffer each step in forced slow-motion, feeling the impact juddering through her bones again and again, striking her her nerves like the thrum of lightning on Pigsy’s rake, tearing at her muscles, burning her blood, razing every part of her body over and over and—

But no: Monkey is right. For the monk’s sake, she needs to go slowly. 

If they are to get free from the barren lands together, she must cast aside her discomfort and think of her endurance. She will achieve nothing by pushing herself so hard she depletes her meagre energy in an hour. She knows this; she has experienced it many times.

But it is still painful.

The horizon remains where it is, fixed and static, as stubborn and immovable as a god. It doesn’t draw closer, and the whisper of water in the back of her mind is eternally out of her grasp, distant and maddeningly untouchable.

It hurts. It hurts.

Every step _hurts_.

Tripitaka keeps pace with her easily, even weighed down by the bulk of their supplies. The bundle is nearly twice his size and must surely be very heavy for his small, slight frame; still, he hauls it along, strapped to his shoulders, without even a murmur of complaint, without the slightest lapse in speed, without so much as a thought for anything else in the world. All he wants, she can tell, is to make the journey as easy as possible for her.

Touching, certainly. But ultimately pointless.

It is not easy. It will never be easy, no matter what Tripitaka does or says or tries.

In a way, it is harder with him than it was with Pigsy.

Sandy cared little for what Pigsy thought of her, and in any case he was injured as well. To say nothing of how poorly suited he was to the harsh environment and to survival in general. She was their lone tether, their compass, their guide; she kept them both alive while he did nothing but complain and lag behind and—

And gasp for breath.

And choke on the dry air, desperate for water she would not let him drink. And moan and wail with hunger, desperate for food she would not let him eat. And smother his suffering so that she might not worry. And—

She remembers the rattling in his chest, the strain of his breathing, his choking, his—

She crashes to a stop.

Misinterpreting, Tripitaka offers her a waterskin.

“It’s only us now,” he says. “Don’t be frugal.”

Sandy tries to shake her head. “I don’t need it.”

It’s not true, though it really should be.

Their progress has brought them close enough to the ever-elusive horizon that she no longer feels the absence of water for days in all directions; she doubts, given her current condition, that they will make it out of the barren lands today, but she can at least sense the presence of water in the hazy distance. Too far to touch, but close enough that its existence — simple and spare though it is — soothes her mind.

It should soothe her body as well.

She doesn’t need to touch the water, or even really to drink it down; she only needs to know it exists.

It’s more than she’s had for days now, and she doesn’t know why it’s not enough to keep her going.

No, untrue: of course she knows.

What else but her own weakness?

Her clothes are stuck to her skin, the bandages are fused to her raw flesh, her face and hair are soaked: she is sweating. Endlessly, uncontrollably, she is sweating. Exertion, nausea, pain, and leftover panic, pulsing out of her in bursts of salt and sourness. She is drenched with it, purging precious water with every moment, every step, every breath. Purging more still with every meal she brings back up, with every salt-stung tear that floods her vision when the pain surges, with every—

Every part of herself.

She is supposed to be a vessel, an endless chalice filled with water, but every atom in her body seems determined right now to drain her dry.

Tripitaka and Pigsy were worried that she would be the most affected by the inhospitable wasteland. They were afraid that the absence of free, fresh water would make her more susceptible to dehydration, more prone to heat sickness, more likely to become weakened. They thought this wretched place would pull her to pieces, but neither one of them counted on her body doing the job first.

And more effectively, at that.

She groans her frustration, a miserable, razor-raw sound that seems to affect Tripitaka on some deep, primal level.

“Sandy, please.” He shakes the skin, almost desperate now. “For me?”

Sandy sighs. “I can’t,” she admits, feeling the shame burn her face; another wave of sweat breaks out across her forehead, another wave of waste. “If I let go of either of these weapons, I’ll fall. And if I fall, I won’t be able to get back up again.”

“Oh.” He winces, then hoists himself up onto his toes. “All right, then. Let me...”

She doesn’t get a chance to decline; he’s already holding the skin up to her lips. 

Instinct takes over, then, before she can even try to suppress it. She drinks as slowly as she can, sparingly, carefully, frugally. No matter what Tripitaka says about their supplies, Sandy will not — cannot — allow herself to relax until they’re beyond the bounds of this place, until she knows with certainty when the next river or lake or spring will be.

“Enough,” she snaps, when her thirst is perhaps a quarter slaked. She turns her face away, burning hot, and adds for Tripitaka’s sake, “This is humiliating.”

It works: he withdraws without question, grimacing his sympathy. “I’m sorry. I just...”

“I know.” She wets her lips with what little remains on her tongue. “You want to help. I understand that, Tripitaka, I do. But water won’t make the pain go away, nor will it get us out of the barren lands any faster.”

“I know.” He looks like he wants to say something else, but seems to recognise that this is not the proper time. “I know.”

He yields, then, stepping back out of her space and taking the skin with him. Sandy nods, grateful for his willingness to concede, and to start moving again without further discussion.

She takes a deep breath before trying to follow. It’s a simple, reflexive thing just to steady herself, but it brings with it visceral memories of Pigsy bracing his whole body with his hands on his knees. How painful must it have been, she thinks unbidden, simply to draw a steadying breath? How much closer to death did he get with each inhalation, each exhalation, each—

She chokes, and very nearly falls.

Tripitaka, by her side again in less than a second, reaches instinctively for her hand.

It is the most fleeting brush of contact, his bare fingertips across the tatters covering her knuckles. A moment only, but it’s enough to set all of her nerves on fire, enough to make her flinch just like she did at the stream, enough to make her rear back—

Enough for her body, overpowered by its instinct to flight, to forget that it is crippled.

She doesn’t go down, but her legs buckle almost completely. For a horrifying second, the weapons really are the only thing holding her up, and the howl that wrenches out of her as her left leg twists and her right fails to compensate, is enough to make Tripitaka blanch until he’s almost as pale as her.

“I’m sorry!” His voice sounds like her insides feel: choked with acid and churning. “Are you okay? I’m sorry! I didn’t mean... I just...”

“Yes.” She doesn’t really know if it’s true or not, only that she would say anything to bring the colour back to Tripitaka’s face, to make him stop looking at her like that. “Yes, I’m fine. It’s not a problem, Tripitaka, just... please, _please_ —”

She doesn’t know what she’s begging for, if anything at all but the word echoes inside her head, _please, please, please,_ circling and circling, bringing with it the memory of Pigsy as he dreamed, his face contorted with bad memories, humiliation and helplessness and horror so much like the kind she sees on Tripitaka’s face just now.

She squeezes the haft of her scythe, the haft of his rake, brings those two terrible elements together, and tries to catch her breath.

Tripitaka, watching her much too closely, squeaks, “Are you all right?”

Sandy nods, swallows down the last of the acid, and says, “I’m sorry.”

Apparently she’s not being as subtle as she thought, because Tripitaka’s expression darkens immediately. He must hear the ache in her voice, so vastly different from the pain in her body, because he doesn’t hesitate; he steps back, hand still outstretched in case she needs the support and says, in a sombre, stoic sort of voice:

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Sandy wants to laugh. She also wants to cry. But she has just got some water into her body and she will not throw it away so swiftly.

“I crushed him with rock and water,” she says instead. “His ribs are broken because I broke them. If he has damage to his lungs, I caused it. Monkey is running himself into the ground to get him to a healer because I did that to him.”

Tripitaka sighs. “You did it to yourself as well,” he points out, gesturing sadly at her ruined leg. “You were drugged and confused and didn’t know what was going on. You were—”

“Tripitaka.” She swallows another surge of pain, the kind that twists like a blade in her chest; a scrape of rust against her lungs and heart, it makes her think of Pigsy again, makes her see too vividly his face as he gasped and choked for air. It gives her the strength to say again the word she choked on before, and to imbue it this time with the power it needs. “ _Please_.”

It works: Tripitaka softens immediately, relenting equally to the word itself and the way it catches on the roof of her mouth. Like always, he cannot bear to see another soul in pain.

She wonders if that’s why she still flinches when he tries to touch her.

It is so unfathomable to her, his kindness. It is so frightening, so disorienting, his soft, sweet compassion. It whispers like the Scholar’s voice, the way he seemed to warm even the awful waste-soaked sewers that were her home, the way they became nicer somehow just by having him in them.

She couldn’t bear to let him touch her. His kindness hurt her.

Tripitaka’s does too, in ways that Sandy can’t put into words.

“Okay,” he says at last, and his voice is low and gentle and full of that unbearable kindness; it is so painful that for a moment it overpowers even the relentless throbbing of Sandy’s bad leg. “Okay, you’re right. We shouldn’t...”

“We should keep moving.” She’s drenched again, she realises angrily. What precious water she drank and tried so hard to keep inside is gone, leeched out through sweat and misery. “If you want to discuss this, wait until we’re out of this place. Wait until we know that he’s...”

 _Or that he isn’t_ , she doesn’t add.

“Yeah.” Tripitaka turns away, angling his body towards the horizon again, as though trying to focus his thoughts on where they need to go. “Do you think you can...?”

Sandy doesn’t answer. It would only use up more energy she can’t afford to waste. 

She speaks with her body instead, bracing herself once more against her scythe and Pigsy’s rake, the clash of lightning with water thrumming under her skin, shaking and strengthening her. A beat, a breath, and she wills herself to start walking.

Tripitaka watches her go. Sandy can feel his eyes on her back, waiting for her to fall.

She doesn’t.

She blocks him out as best she can. His presence, the weight of his attention, even the gentle in-and-out of his breathing. She focuses only on what matters: on moving forward, on manipulating her weapons, her borrowed limbs, on keeping her own off the ground as much as possible. It’s all she has room inside herself to do: focus and move, focus and move, sliding into a rhythm that feels as artificial as her crutches, like she too is evolving into something less than real.

All the better that the effort forces her to silence her mind as well.

She can’t afford to think when she’s trying to walk, and she definitely can’t afford to feel. She can’t afford to do anything but keep going, keep pushing, keep pressing forward, step by agonising step.

She’s not sure she wants to know what will happen when that single-minded focus is no longer needed. When they’re out of this place, as she said to Tripitaka, and when they know Pigsy is well or not, when she no longer has to struggle every waking moment just to keep her body in check and alive. When her leg is resting and healing at last, when she doesn’t have to go anywhere or do anything or push through, doesn’t have to survive, doesn’t have to ration her water or food or resources, when the only thing left are all the thoughts and feeling she’s been trying so hard to push down.

She pushes them down again now, and the dread along with them.

One step, then another. That’s all she can afford to think of.

Behind her, Tripitaka takes in a deep breath, lets it out in a sigh, then scrambles to catch up.

*

They don’t talk very much.

Tripitaka is a different sort of travelling companion than Pigsy, and in some ways a much more pleasant one. He doesn’t complain that he’s hungry or tired, he doesn’t insist that they stop to rest or to eat, and after his first few attempts are met with stony silence he stops asking if she’s all right.

He is also uninjured, so Sandy doesn’t have to pay so much attention to his breathing or his footsteps, the little telltale sounds of exertion and pain that she so clearly underestimated in Pigsy.

Could she have avoided this, she wonders, if she’d paid more attention? If she’d listened to her instincts when they told her he was in more pain than he let on, if she’d shown more patience or compassion when he said he was tired, if she’d let him eat more when he was hungry, drink more of their scarce water, if she’d given in and given him every little thing he’d asked for?

Would it have saved him, she wonders, or only condemned them both?

It doesn’t matter now. She knows this quite well. But still she wonders.

And, while wondering, she walks. All day, stopping only when necessity dictates, when Tripitaka’s fragile human constitution calls for sustenance or water or respite. He’s always polite and regretful when it happens, in a way that Pigsy never was, like the little human realises where the mighty god did not that it causes Sandy more pain to pause briefly than it would to keep moving and never stop at all. Even when the labour of walking makes her want to cry, even when her teeth are clenched so tightly they chatter, even when it is relentless, ceaseless, endless.

They stop. The pain intensifies.

They start moving again, and it is worse, it is worse, it is _worse_. But she powers through and she finds a rhythm, and by the time she’s blocked out the pain enough that it starts to lessen, they again need to stop.

So it goes, all through the day.

Tripitaka insists that she eat regularly, and doesn’t fuss when the pain makes her vomit. He insists that she drink even more regularly, and pretends not to notice the way she immediately loses the moisture too, through sweat and tears. He keeps her going, just as she kept Pigsy going, but unlike her — because he is kind, because he is patient, because he is not a god-made monster — he does not snap or shout or chasten her when she wastes what they cannot afford to lose.

He says, “It’s okay,” when she burns through their resources, and Sandy knows it’s not but she lacks the strength to say so.

The sun hasn’t yet set when he suggests they stop for the night.

“We won’t be making out of here today,” he points out, with the well-practised patience he’s been using on her all day. “Might as well rest up and start fresh in the morning.”

Sandy looks to the horizon. It is dark now, but flickering with hope: slowly, almost imperceptibly, her keen god’s eyes can make out a shimmer of promise, blurry shadows that might be trees or buildings or both; it’s the first time she’s caught a glimpse of anything other than dunes and dead space, and the sight — dim and unreliable though it is — makes her heart almost burst.

They may not make it tonight, but they certainly will tomorrow.

If she paces herself. If she doesn’t push them too hard. If she—

She sighs, accepts Tripitaka’s decision with pain-heavy weariness. “You have a point. And you are human. You need your rest, yes?”

Tripitaka chuckles, then swiftly smothers it. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

A bald-faced lie, and one he makes only a cursory attempt to hide, but Sandy accepts it because she no longer cares. Apparently she left her dignity back at their last camp, in the great broad crater left by Pigsy’s body where he lay so still and so silent and so—

She bites down on her tongue, swallows the scream, the sob.

After a day of hard travel, it is agony to lay her body down. A dreadful agony, yes, but a familiar one, and there is comfort to be found in knowing she won’t have to stand up again until morning.

It helps. Just a little, but enough. Once she is down, once the screaming stops — the metaphorical screaming, pulses of pain up and down her shattered nerves, and the literal screaming as she bites down on her sleeve and chokes on bile — she feels more settled than she has in some time. 

That is, until she looks up at Tripitaka and remembers why: that he is there, that he is able-bodied and eager to help, that he can provide anything she needs.

Sandy doesn’t know that she’s ever had that.

It certainly wasn’t the case with Pigsy, he being as injured as her, and far lazier as well.

And even if he hadn’t been she doubts she would have allowed him to attend her needs.

Sandy is not used to being taken care of, or looked after or watched over. It sits sourly in her stomach, churning along with the fistful of berries Tripitaka insists that she eat, and makes her feel scared and unsteady.

She doesn’t feel safe under the watchful eye of another; it feels like she’s back in some demon’s prison, observed and guarded and held down until she can be made useful.

She has been travelling with an injured companion for so long, forcing her own suffering down and down and down so that she might keep him going, keep their supplies rationed, keep pressing on towards their destination, it feels strange to no longer have to do that. To not be the only one carrying the burden of their survival, to not be the only one capable of holding so much weight...

Tripitaka should not have to carry her. Sandy doesn’t want him to.

But she’s tired.

She is so _tired_.

Tripitaka sits himself down beside her, a few hand’s spaces closer than Sandy would like. He takes great care not to spend too much time looking directly at her, but she can tell he’s studying her closely all the same, using all of his monastic talents to gauge her mood, her pain, her survival instincts. Wondering, perhaps, if it’s safe to try and touch her, if it’s safe to try and talk to her, if it’s safe just to be there at all, sitting by her side and doing nothing.

Sandy hates that he has to wonder.

She hates that he is right to do so.

“You can,” she says, the words coming out in a hoarse croak. “Talk. Touch. Anything you like. You can.”

Tripitaka peers at her, curious and sort of hopeful. His face catches the reddish-orange glow of the sunset, illuminated and radiant. He looks so beautiful, Sandy thinks, so different from the Scholar, so different from any human she’s ever met before.

His fingertips flex in the space between them. Hungry, hopeful. He says, ever so softly, “Are you sure?”

Sandy nods. “Your touch couldn’t possibly make me more miserable than I already am. And I know that it would bring you comfort to make contact, so...” She closes her eyes, wills her nerves to settle, her blood to cool, her instincts to find some peace. “If you want to, you can.”

He does. Gentle, careful, covering her pale, damp knuckles with his warm, sunset-darkened palm.

“I missed you,” he says, like a whispered secret. “Both of you.”

Sandy knows he means the words as a comfort — _you were missed, you are wanted, you belong here with us_ — but she has never heard anything more devastating in her life. To be any one of those things, much less all of them. To be so much a part of something that her absence is felt as something profound. These are terrors, the kind that shudder through her bones and make her wish she had water enough to waste on tears.

“I’m sorry,” she hears herself say. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t... I’m sorry that he...” She can’t finish either of those thoughts, though; there are too many endings, too many beginnings. It hurts worse than her leg, so she just says, again and again, “I’m sorry.”

Tripitaka doesn’t tell her not to be. He doesn’t tell her it’s silly to apologise for things that can’t be changed. He doesn’t tell her it’s not important or that it doesn’t matter, doesn’t tell her to save her strength, doesn’t tell her that it’s all right. Perhaps he wants to, perhaps he doesn’t; either way he seems to understand that it would do her no good to hear any of those things.

Instead, still so devastatingly gentle, he presses her hand, looks up at her with quiet sorrow and asks, as if she never said anything at all, “How’s your leg?”

Sandy doesn’t waste her breath on answering. There is no doubt in her mind that he can see it already, printed in the lines of her face, the way her features twist with each pulse of pain, the way her knuckles tremble under his fingertips. He is so close, the contact between them so complete; she knows that he can read every twitch of her body.

“I’ll be glad,” she says, letting the exhaustion drip like water off her tongue, “when we’re out of this place.”

“When you can rest properly, you mean?” Said without judgement, but Sandy recognises the opening for what it is, and she’s not surprised when he reaches into his pouch and draws out his pain-relief herbs. Another night, another attempt to drug her into sleep; Sandy wishes she had the strength to sigh as the little monk musters a smile and says, “You know, Pigsy isn’t here right now. Whatever loss of control you were afraid of last night...”

Sandy stares at the leaves, at the hand holding them, then the one still touching her own. He is still and steady, solid as a mountain and strong as magic-imbued stone; he is everything she’s not. His skin, darker than hers even under the blazing sun, is all the more so now, glowing in the fading daylight, lineless and so full of life.

He has a point, she knows: without Pigsy’s presence to trigger her reflexes and responses, does she have any reason to fear herself? Tripitaka may be small and human and delicate but they have little enough water between them that she couldn’t drown or crush him even if she tried. Her instincts are quiet, even the urge to flinch away from his touches tempered by her exhaustion and the quiet warmth behind his eyes; it is enough to quiet her raving mind, knowing that he is comforted.

All this she knows, at least in the tiny piece of herself that is able to think rationally. All this tells her that she should not be afraid, even of herself.

But she is. Weakened or not, waterless or not, she is still a god with a god’s strength coursing through her veins, and he is still a human, small and fragile and so much weaker. She could snap his neck in a moment of delirium and he would be dead before she even realised it was him. She could break every bone in his delicate little body with only the fingers of one hand.

She might need her powers to drown a prison full of demons and the god who once worked with them, but Tripitaka is not a demon or a god. If her vision wasn’t so bleary, she could probably see the labyrinth of his veins, tiny little tributaries without a sea to call their home, rivers and streams carrying blood not water, so close to the surface. So small, so easily crushed or cut open or—

She gags.

Tripitaka tries to squeeze her hand again, reassurance and grounding, but Sandy pulls away, fists pressed to her mouth, willing herself not to be sick, not to scream, not to sob.

“My thoughts are so violent,” she forces out, the words pressed like prayers to the backs of her knuckles. “I can’t, please, I...”

But she doesn’t know how to begin trying to explain it. Tripitaka, like the Scholar before him, is so full of peace and hope and reverence. Has he ever had a violent thought in his life, she wonders. Does he harbour any ill feelings for the demon who took the Scholar’s life, who destroyed his home and killed his family and left him to walk the world alone? Monks preach forgiveness and empathy in all things; this she remembers well from the Scholar’s teachings, the lesson she always failed to learn. How to explain to one so much like him, how it feels to think of nothing but brutality every minute of every day?

Tripitaka shuffles back a little, to give her space. “It’s okay.”

 _No, it’s not_ , Sandy thinks. And even if it was, it shouldn’t be.

“You don’t understand,” she says, tapping the side of her head with her closed fist. “What it’s like in here.”

Tripitaka smiles sadly. “Maybe not,” he concedes. “But I do understand what it’s like in there.”

And he taps his chest, then points to hers, the empty space behind her ribs that might have once held a functional heart. Like he can make it beat properly just by looking at it, just by touching it, just by—

Sandy shakes her head. “No.”

“Yes.” He leans back, clasping his hands in front of him as though in meditation; she can tell that he really wants to try and touch her again, that he’s holding the impulse in check for her sake. “Sandy, when you attacked him that night in the forest, you felt nothing. Just anger and pain and...” He doesn’t actually say ‘fear’, but she hears it and feels it just the same. “You almost ripped his arm out of its socket. You drew blood. And when I tried to talk to you about it, all you said was that he deserved it.”

Sandy runs this over in her mind. After everything that’s happened since, that night is little more than a blur, a hazy, half-remembered pinprick on a horizon long since left behind.

She doesn’t know what he expects her to say about it, so all she manages is a confused, “Yes?”

Tripitaka hesitates for a beat, thoughtful and maybe a bit uncertain. Like he doesn’t know quite how to phrase himself, or whether Sandy is ready to hear what he has to say.

Finally, clearly choosing his words very carefully, he says, “I don’t think you feel that way any more.”

Sandy doesn’t know if she does or not. To find out for sure, she’d have to think about it, and she definitely doesn’t want to have to do that. It’s hard enough to sift through her thoughts and feelings in the present; to look back at what happened before, to recontextualise her now-self with her then-self will only make things murkier. She doesn’t have the strength for that, and she is far too tired to try.

“Perhaps,” she concedes, because Tripitaka really seems to want her to agree with him.

“It’s true,” he insists, either ignoring or simply oblivious to her weary indifference. He looks so sure, so trusting; it makes her want to hide. “Sandy, it’s not him you’re afraid of now. It’s yourself. Your loss of control, your power, your anger. That makes a difference.”

“Does it?”

“Yeah.” His smile wavers just slightly, like a candle-flame in a gentle breeze, then swiftly reignites. “Listen. You’re right that I don’t... that I’ll probably never understand what it’s like inside your head. All those dark, awful thoughts in there all the time... I can’t even imagine how horrible it must be. But I do understand _why_ they’re there. It’s all you knew for the longest time, violence and pain, other people’s hatred and cruelty, your own anger and fear...”

Sandy’s head pulses. She clenches her jaw and says, “Enough.”

“Right.” This time, when his smile starts to flicker, he lets it extinguish itself completely. “I just mean, I understand that it’s the only way your mind knows to process everything. To deal with the things you’ve been through. Feeling it so strongly, so overwhelmingly, so much of the time...”

That doesn’t make it easier. It doesn’t help. Sandy bites down on her tongue. “Doesn’t matter why it’s there,” she points out. “Only that it is. And it _is_. And it won’t...”

“I know. And I know how much that scares you.” He looks down, freeing her from the cage of his dark, beautiful eyes, and scuffs his boots in the cooling sand. “But it doesn’t scare _me_.”

The confession makes Sandy feel shaky and weak, the way she gets sometimes after vomiting or sweating out too much precious water. Like there’s not enough of anything left inside her.

“It’s dangerous,” she whispers, trying to put that sick feeling into words. “To not be afraid.”

“Not any more,” Tripitaka tells her, with such passion, such intensity Sandy feels like her chest will catch fire. “I think your head and your body will realise that in time. But until that happens...”

He holds out the herbs again.

Sandy stares at them, feeling very unsafe. “For the pain?” she asks warily. “Or for sleep?”

She wills herself to stay still when Tripitaka shuffles closer again. Wills her mind not to go blank with panic, wills her body not to flinch or rear back or lash out. Wills herself to breathe — only breathe, she can’t focus on more than that, can’t even try — when he carefully cracks open one of her fists and presses the dried, delicate leaves into her palm.

“For you,” he says simply. “If you want them.”

*

Sandy does not want them, but she does take them.

Later, much later. When Tripitaka is asleep, when the night has thrown its ice-dusted shroud over them both. When it is dark and cold, when the hours are endless and there is nothing left to keep her from being pulled down into despair. No distractions, nothing to occupy her thoughts, no horizon to stare at or journey to map out, nothing but the relentless downward pull of pain, exhaustion, and misery.

She can’t endure another night of this. She can’t endure—

Tripitaka sleeps so soundlessly. After two nights of Pigsy’s moaning and groaning, two days of listening to his ribs creak and rattle in his chest, after all that time so attuned to noise, to sound, to _listening_ —

She has yearned for silence like this. Now she has it, she finds she can’t bear it.

She crawls as far away from him as she can get without having to try and stand. Clumsy and awkward and not at all soundless, she moves like a beached sea-creature struggling to drag itself back to the surf, stranded and vulnerable on the chilly sand. No help in any direction, and even if there were she’d never accept it.

It is terrifying to put the dried leaves into her mouth. It is far more so to chew on them, slowly, carefully, knowing that she is surrendering her control to something unknown.

Surrendering herself, body, mind, everything, to faith, to trust, to—

It is _terrifying_.

It continues to be terrifying, even after she’s choked them down — decision made, action taken, she can’t go back now — for the few heart-stopping seconds before they seep into her system and start to take effect.

The pain goes first. Never dissipating fully — experience has taught her it would take a lot more than some herbal remedy to achieve that kind of a miracle — but after so long spent suffering so completely even the smallest lull feels like an immense reprieve. The screaming stifles itself, the pounding dulled to a medium-awful throb, and the relief is so profound that she almost forgets to be frightened, almost forgets that she has good reason to be.

It is the first lessening she’s felt since the pain first hit, and it overpowers her so much that when the drowsiness swoops down over her — a few seconds later, a few hours, who can say? — it feels almost natural. A moment’s silence after so much screaming, a moment’s peace after so much _painpainpain_ , and as her thoughts grow fuzzy she thinks, who wouldn’t want to sleep after all that?

And she does.

She sleeps deeply, and she dreams deeper still.

Not of violence. Not of anger or wildness or brutality, not any of the countless horrors that made her feel so unsafe and so afraid of herself.

She dreams of a different horror entirely.

A gentler one, a quieter one, but a horror just the same, and one that had its claws dug just as deep inside of her as all the others.

 _Helplessness_.

Her own, of course. She sees herself as she was so many times over the years, cornered and trapped, their drug-heavy smoke in her lungs, her head spinning, her body limp and useless. She could have defended herself if only she could see straight, if only she could stand, if only—

If only.

But this time it is not only herself she sees.

Others too, nameless and half-forgotten, silhouettes dredged from the darkest corners of her broken memory. Humans cast out from their homes because they could not pay Locke’s taxes, because they would not bow to her guards, because they would not blindly do as they were told. Gods too, swept off the streets in the dead of night, stolen away from places with no witnesses and sent to places with no escape. Lives destroyed, souls snuffed out, the world cut open and its people left to bleed.

And there, every time, right at the epicentre: Pigsy.

She dreams of a god whose name she never knew. He fed her once when she was starving, a mouthful of bread from his own meagre stock. A mouthful, no more, and he was gone before she found the strength to thank him.

He had no choice: disappear, or risk discovery and the hell that followed.

It gave her another day, the meagre crumbs he spared. And the day after that, she was strong enough to get back up and find her own.

Two days later she huddled in the shadows, helpless and shivering, and watched as they took him apart.

No. Not ‘they’. _He_.

Pigsy, flanked by his vicious, violent, virulent humans. They kept a safe distance, cowering behind him like the spineless creatures they were. Aware, no doubt, of the threat their cornered prey might pose if he took it upon himself to fight back. Perhaps realising, too, the significance of leaving the task to Pigsy alone, the vast hulking mass of immortality who was their shield. Knowing that he was a god too, knowing that he was staring into his own eyes as he raised his rake high, as he brought it down, as the lightning set fire to the world and made it burn—

The static in the air made Sandy’s lungs burn too. She felt like the bolt had struck her in the chest, stopped her heart and her breath, slain her right there where she lay.

A part of her wished it had. Many times, over the years, she wished that. A painless, instant death, little suffering; wasn’t that the best a thing like her could ever hope for?

The rest of her — the part that stubbornly refused to die, the part that had kept her alive even in her most desolate and desperate moments — continued its futile, pointless quest for survival.

She couldn’t move. That part of her wouldn’t allow it.

Paralysed, trembling, useless. Face pressed to the rain-wet ground, feeling the lightning vibrate under the water, biting down on her tongue to silence her cries, holding her ears to silence theirs. She wanted to get up, to help, to do something — anything, anything, anything, _he fed you, he kept you alive, he was good to you, he was good, he was good_ — but she couldn’t move at all.

Survival, pinning her down, holding her in place.

Keeping her alive again.

She should have moved. She should have helped.

She should have _tried_.

She—

She knows now, in the hazy void between dreaming and waking — between then and now, what was and what is and what one day might be — that Pigsy felt the same.

That perhaps he always has.

She remembers, somehow vivid and blurry at once, the anguish on his face as he turned away, unable to bear the sight of his own hands, his own body, his own unforgivable deeds. She remembers — and she sees it again now, through the rich-coloured haze of dream and memory and delirium — the rake falling from his hands after the thing was done. She remembers the flickering green as the lightning sputtered out, remembers the god—

Motionless. Lying there at Pigsy’s feet. So still and so silent.

He’d become so human, she thought. So fragile, so small. She couldn’t tell if he was hurt, couldn’t tell if he was alive, if he was well, if there was anything left of him at all. She couldn’t see, and she couldn’t lift her head to try.

Her mind, warped and cracked, remembered the bread in his hands, and her stomach remembered the strength it gave her, and its spasms wracked her body over and over and— 

And she wondered, then, was she really any different to Pigsy? She who could not move, frozen by her stupid, stubborn instincts, who could not stand up even to save one who had saved her.

All through the night she sees it, over and over and over again.

Herself in hiding, paralysed and helpless while others suffered. Sometimes sick or hurt or weakened, sometimes simply freezing up by instinct, but always stuck, always still, always unmoving. And them: humans, gods, _people_ , taken or beaten or struck down in the streets, vanished by morning with no sign that they’d ever been there at all.

And she knew — no, she knows, she knows, _she_ _knows_ — how they felt, she knows their helplessness, their fear, their pain because it runs just as hot in her own blood. She knows, she knew, she _knows_ , but she couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t, she didn’t, she—

And Pigsy. Always him, always there, always with his weapon in hand. His face thrown into shadow from the lamps and the moonlight above, his eyes hollowed-out sockets and his hands like swollen skeletons. He looked helpless as well, every time, even as he struck them down or ordered them to be taken, even as he used his weapon, his voice, his bare hands to drag them away, even as he ruined their lives and destroyed their homes and broke their bones and burned their bodies.

Over and over again, she dreams. Over and over again, all through the night. A thousand encounters, a thousand moments, real and imagined and sometimes both, until she can no longer remember which monster was him and which one was her: the coward that brought down the lightning so he wouldn’t have to feel its wrath turned back on himself, or the one shivering in the shadows, huddled and helpless and hiding.

A terrible price, such dreams, for a few hours’ sleep. A terrible thing, to dream and see and feel and know—

A terrible thing, too, to wake at dawn with their faces burned onto her mind’s eye but no names on her tongue.

She never knew theirs. She barely even knew her own.

Only his. Over and over and over again, she knew his.

Tripitaka is standing over her when she blinks her eyes open. Salt-stung and bleary, it takes her a moment to focus, and when she does she finds his face tight with worry. He’s trying to smile, she can tell, but it’s not really working; he looks pained and tense, and he’s looking down at her like she’s a phantom, one of the barren lands’ beasts wriggling up from beneath the sand.

She expects him to pry, to ask what she was dreaming. He always enjoys talking about things like that.

He doesn’t, though.

He sits down beside her, moving slowly and tentatively. Then, without touching or speaking, without making any kind of meaningful contact at all, he holds out a waterskin.

Sandy looks at it, then at him.

Then she looks down at herself, sweat-soaked and shuddering. She is a wretched thing by any definition, a wraith clawing its way out of the wreckage of what she was, all the pain and fear and anger that should have been long since laid to rest. She buried herself, she buried him, she buried a prison full of demons; why can’t she bury this too?

There is so little left of her. Her hands won’t stop shaking, won’t stop making fists, won’t stop hurting others. Her leg, ravaged and ruined, unable to keep her standing without the help of his awful weapon. Her mind, tangled, twisted, full to overflowing with the most terrible things...

She is worse now, she realises, than she was then.

Surviving is easy, she thinks, recalling the helplessness, the paralysis, the desperation and fear and pain. It is so easy to live through even the worst days pursued by the knowledge that it might yet be the last. Waiting for it to happen or not, breath held just to see if it would stop for good.

Hoping, sometimes, that it would.

On the really bad days, the ones with no light, no life, no warmth. The days where hunger made her rabid, where pain made her desperate, where fear made her tremble and shiver, hide in the shadows or lash out again and again and again.

But she’s past that now.

At least, she should be.

She survived. She made it out, to a place where she no longer needs to. She lived—

She lived through it.

And now, somehow, she has to live with it.

*


	12. Chapter 12

*

Tripitaka insists on a slow and substantial breakfast.

“We’ll be out of here today anyway,” he says, waving a cheery hand at the horizon. “We don’t need to hoard our supplies any more. And you need a good meal even more than you needed a good night’s sleep.”

Sandy refrains from pointing out that her sleep was not ‘good’ by any definition.

“I’ll do my best,” she says instead, because if she has learned one thing from her time on the quest it’s that there is little point arguing with Tripitaka once he’s made up his mind to something.

And he has indeed made up his mind to this.

He makes sure she eats well, and he doesn’t let her try to stand until he’s sure the meal will stay down. Gentle but firm, he presses but never pushes too hard, encourages with just enough of a bite to his tone that she can swallow it down along with the food, without too much trouble.

He is getting better at this, she notes. Navigating her twists and turns, cutting off his compassion before it starts to burn. He guides her, encourages her, and when he’s sure those things aren’t going to work he is not afraid to turn his tongue on its side and order her.

It works. She eats on command, stays seated until he gives her permission to try and stand, and in return he keeps his distance and doesn’t try to touch her. 

The sun is higher than Sandy would like by the time Tripitaka finally allows them to break camp, but her stomach is full and seems content to stay that way, and her thirst is at least partly slaked, and her body—

Her body is somewhat the worse, in truth, for his ‘good night’s sleep’.

It hurts to stand. Not just her leg, screaming and tearing in its usual manner, but the rest of her as well, stiff and sore and unaccustomed to so much stillness. She can’t remember the last time she slept through the night; her muscles scarcely know what to do with themselves after so much time at rest in the same position.

Tripitaka watches her crawl up the haft of her scythe, painstaking and painful. He’s clenching his jaw and balling his fists, visibly biting down on the urge to rush to her side, to hold out his hands, to try and help in whatever way he can, whatever way she needs.

What she needs from him is what he ultimately gives: restraint, control, and distance above all else.

He gives her those things, even though it goes against every notion he has of what it means to help. He gives them because he knows it’s what she needs, even if he doesn’t understand it. Touch never helps, only causes more pain, more difficulty; she knows this and he knows it about her. He may not understand it, may even resent it a little, but he knows that it matters to her. And so, though it clearly pains him nearly as much as it pains her to try and stand, he holds himself back and lets her do it by herself.

He waits until she’s fully upright, balanced between her crutches and at least mostly steady before breaking the silence with a simple, quiet, “All good?”

Sandy nods. “Always,” she says, with only the slightest tremor. Then, with rather more of one, blurted out before she can stop herself, “I hope Monkey found help.”

“Monkey’s smart,” Tripitaka says, with his usual unshakeable faith. “And strong. He’ll find it.”

“Good.” The word cracks, splintering on the dry air like wood struck by lightning. Sandy pretends it’s just the exertion, the strain of holding herself up rather than the strain of holding her heart down. “I don’t want... that is, I wouldn’t...”

She doesn’t know how to finish. She’s not sure she should have started.

Unbidden, flashes from her dreams flicker before her eye like shards of sunlight. Pigsy, his rake held high, the anguish in his face as he turned away, hiding from his victims and his deeds. Herself, shaking in the shadows, the mirroring anguish in her own body as it betrayed her and left her paralysed and unable to help.

She wonders if that’s how he sees himself. Helpless, hopeless, powerless. She wonders if that’s what he would say if she asked him how he felt in those moments, with his fist or his voice or his weapons raised to the sky.

She thinks, as she wills her body into motion, that perhaps she wouldn’t want him to die before she can ask.

She thinks, feeling ashamed, that perhaps that’s not a particularly good reason for wanting him to stay alive.

She thinks—

“Sandy?”

Tripitaka.

He’s moving now too, keeping effortless pace with her. There’s little more than a hand’s space between them, like he expects he’ll have to lunge forwards and catch her at any moment, like he’s so afraid she won’t be able to hold herself upright even with two god-weapons as crutches. He doesn’t touch, doesn’t even try, but the fear of weakness grates against her skin even so, like a weather-roughened stone.

Sandy doesn’t look at him. She fixes her gaze on the horizon, and does not allow it to waver.

“I don’t know what I want,” she admits, because she knows that’s what he wants to hear, the end of the sentence she never should have started. “I don’t know how I feel. I don’t think I know anything at all.”

Tripitaka hums, feigning contemplation as if to humour her. “That’s okay.”

“Is it?” She truly doesn’t know. “I would’ve thought it’d be simple, no? Not wanting a friend to die. Not wanting anyone to. Even not a friend. Even...”

Even him. Whatever he was, whatever he is now.

And especially not like this. At her hands, but not directly or deliberately. None of the countless different ways she’d imagined it over the years, strangling or suffocation or stabbing, her knife to his gut or her scythe to his skull; she pictured vengeance, she dreamed of vindication, she imagined the blood on her hands finally flowing for a good reason. She dreamed of it, ravenous and rabid and raving, and those dreams sustained her during her darkest days and her worst nights.

None of them looked anything like this.

Delirium and drugs, drowning, demons.

Certainly not like this: the two of them finally on the same side, companions and maybe friends. Not like this, her out of control, the violence in her head unending and unstoppable, the pains in her chest when his breathing stuttered and stalled and—

Not like _this_.

She wanted to kill him for so long. It hasn’t softened as much as it should: now she only wants to hurt him.

And she doesn’t know — truly, she has no idea — if she wants him to live just so she can do that.

After a long, thoughtful silence, Tripitaka says, “It should be simple, yes. But sometimes things just aren’t.”

Sandy knows this all too well. She wishes she didn’t know it at all.

“I brought him back,” she says. It’s not the first time she’s said this, and it probably won’t be the last; she feels like she has to keep saying it, to remind herself that it happened, that she at least tried to do the right thing, even just once. “I brought him back to you. I kept him alive so that he would have the chance to be part of something bigger than himself, to rejoin the quest and redeem himself. I did that. I did it.”

“You did,” Tripitaka agrees quietly. “I know.”

“I did it because I wanted...” The word catches, like a tangled knot in the middle of a thread; it feels wrong. “No. I didn’t.”

“I know,” Tripitaka says again, heavier now. “You didn’t want it. But you knew it was the right thing to do. That’s enough.”

“Is it?” She doesn’t feel like it is. “Because I still don’t... I still feel so...”

“Violent?”

This he says without inflection. No accusation, no judgement, neither cruelty nor compassion. Soft and sweet, like everything he says, but without the indigestible kindness he wears so often. He says it like there is nothing new in the word, like it’s not dangerous, destructive, deadly. Like he’s forgotten what damage those violent feelings can wreak.

Like he’s forgotten all the ways it has made itself known over the last few days, too, all the chaos it’s brought down on them all. The way she twisted Pigsy’s arm almost out of its socket, the blood beading on his neck, the waterskin exploding in his face. Like he’s forgotten that her leg, still howling with every step, is just as much a casualty of that violence.

Like he doesn’t _understand_ —

“He was a monster,” Sandy says, trying to explain. “And he made me a monster too. But he... _he_ is trying to become better, and I’m just getting worse.”

“You’re in pain,” Tripitaka reminds her, with the endless patience typical of a monk. “You’ve been in pain for a very, very long time.”

Sandy looks down at her legs, the left one all but useless, the right shaking and sore as she drives herself forward on her makeshift crutches.

“That won’t be changing any time soon,” she sighs. “So it seems.”

Tripitaka makes a strained sound; Sandy suspects it’s supposed to be a laugh, though it catches in his throat like a whimper or a groan.

“It’s a hard thing to do,” he says, with far more patience than she deserves. “To let it go.”

A strange turn of phrase. It makes Sandy’s shoulders go tight, makes her stomach twist, makes her clench her teeth and grip the haft of her scythe — not his rake, never that — tightly enough that her knuckles turn white.

She steadies herself, limps forward a few excruciating steps, then says, as calmly as she can, “I’m not holding on to it on purpose, Tripitaka.”

Tripitaka grimaces. “I didn’t mean to say you are,” he says. “I only mean... you know, when pain is the only thing you’ve ever known, it can be hard to adjust to a world without it. To wake up in the morning and not...”

He trails off, awkwardly clearing his throat.

Sandy thinks back to last night, the herb-induced sleep and the dreams that followed, to the yellow haze of dawn burned onto her eyes, bringing her back to the desert from the darker world inside her head. Was she crying out in her sleep, she wonders. Did Tripitaka hear her dreams? Is that why he didn’t ask about them?

The thought makes her feel vulnerable, like she’s been stripped down and exposed to the world. It makes her feel like her insides are as much on display as the flesh and muscle of her butchered leg, like he can see through her clothes and under her skin, to the delicate network of veins carrying blood, the fragile cage of her ribs, her weak, stuttering heart.

“Oh,” she says.

She has no idea why.

Tripitaka pretends not to hear. He’s quiet for a long while, and their path continues unhindered, soundless but for the sand shifting under their boots, the wind catching in her hair and his robes. Sandy focuses on walking, limping, stumbling. She focuses on the horizon, drawing that little bit closer with each step, the distant water growing ever more present, ever more real.

 _A few more hours_ , she thinks desperately. _Just a few more..._

Finally, seemingly from out of nowhere, Tripitaka blurts out, “You like to hide.”

Sandy blinks, somewhat thrown. “Was that a secret?”

“No.” He lifts a hand, as if to swat her arm, then lets it drop back down to his side without making contact. Sandy’s shoulders loosen, if only very slightly. “But I think that’s what this is, too. The violence, the anger, the pain and the fear and those horrible things inside your head. Survival. It’s a safe place for you, I think.”

Sandy doesn’t trust herself to nod without falling to the ground, so she just says, “It’s the only safe place.”

“It’s hard,” Tripitaka says again, softer but with quiet strength. Understanding, perhaps, or as much of it as a sheltered, loved human could have for a wild, wretched monster of a god. “To let go of the things that made us feel safe. To step out of our hiding places. To be—”

“Yes,” Sandy whispers, feeling small and scared. “To _be_.”

She expects him to say more, to make some kind of a point about this. She doesn’t know what, exactly, but the look on his face is quiet and faintly reminiscent of the Scholar — wise, thoughtful, soft, and terrifying — and she can tell that he’s reading the lines on her face like a scroll.

She expects a lecture or a lesson; that’s what the Scholar would have done, trying to teach her in his reverent, human way to show patience and kindness, to her enemies and to herself most of all. To see goodness even in a world where there is none, and to let that be a balm for the pain.

She expects—

She expects more words, in all their myriad, incomprehensible colours. Humans do so love to talk, and monks like the Scholar and Tripitaka believe they can rewrite the whole world with only the power of their words.

Sandy thinks maybe they can, at that.

But changing the world is easy. Changing a soul is not. And she doesn’t know if she could bear to see Tripitaka fail to change hers like the Scholar did. To disappoint one is hard enough; to disappoint them both would end her.

Thankfully, he doesn’t try.

Instead, he holds up a waterskin. Close enough to her face that she could lean in and drink without effort, if she wanted to, and not have to humiliate herself by asking.

“You look thirsty,” he says.

Sandy furrows her brow. The waterskin blurs and dances, too close for her eyes to focus on it. Even without touching it with her lips she can taste the precious water inside, stagnant and tepid but life-giving even so, as pure and wonderful as any that flows free.

“I don’t understand,” she says, blinking rapidly. “Is this a metaphor?”

Tripitaka chuckles, warm and fond. “It’s water.”

Sandy thinks of her powers, of the free-flowing danger under her skin, the mist crackling blue in her veins and between her fingers. She thinks of Pigsy, his broken ribs, his struggles to breathe, crushed by a prison she brought down with the power of water alone. She thinks of another waterskin, identical to the one Tripitaka holds out now, exploding in his hand.

She thinks—

She thinks that answers her question.

*

Tripitaka doesn’t ask any more questions, nor does he offer any more insights.

Sandy doesn’t know whether to be thankful for that or disappointed. Silence is a familiar friend, comfortable and easy, but with the pain shrieking up and down her nerves, it becomes heavier than usual; with nothing to distract herself, she has only her own steps to think about, only the oppressive heat as the sun scorches her head, only the effort, the agony, the struggle to keep moving.

It makes the task even more unpleasant than it should be. It makes it harder, so much so that a part of her almost misses Pigsy and his endless complaints, his insistences that they stop every few minutes so that he might catch his faltering breath, his endless appetites, his endless thirst, his endless—

Perhaps not.

She tries to ration their supplies with Tripitaka the way she did with him, but the little monk refuses to allow it. He doesn’t let her direct their course or their pace, doesn’t let her protect him or shelter him or walk in front of him so that he might be safe. He doesn’t let her do anything but the one thing she hates, the task that takes up her whole mind, effortful and exhausting and awful.

“Just focus on walking,” he says, and she does.

But she also worries. She worries because he will not stop snacking on their supplies or trying to offer her water or insisting that it’s all right if they slow down a little more, a little more, a little more.

She worries because these things are frivolous, because they are dangerous, because she can feel how much lighter the waterskin is each time he holds it up to her mouth and she can see how much lighter their supplies are every time he rifles around for another snack just to pass the time, and she can see—

“You have to be more frugal,” she says, hearing her voice quake with exertion.

Tripitaka sighs, and pops another piece of fruit into his mouth seemingly just to be rebellious. “We’re not in survival mode any more, Sandy.”

Sandy cannot make any sense of this. “We’re not out of the barren lands yet.”

That argument, she concedes, is growing weaker with each passing hour, weaker and weaker as the cool blues and greens in the distance draw ever closer, until it’s no longer the far horizon but a few leagues away at most.

Still, though, she clings to it, the only truth she can hold: they have to be _frugal_.

Even when it becomes obvious that they don’t.

Even when the line grows clear, marked out just a league or two ahead of them. Even when she knows they’ll be free of the desert within an hour at most, when she knows that Tripitaka is right, that there really is little point in saving their resources, that there is lush grass and free-flowing water just a little ways ahead of them.

Even knowing that he’s right when he tells her it’s over — _we’re safe now, we’re almost out of here, we’re safe, we’re safe_ — still she can’t quite bring herself to believe it.

Just as he said: she can’t let it go.

The sand grows thinner, finer, fainter, the ground beneath more solid, more steady, more like earth and dirt.

Bit by bit, slowly but surely, the dry air grows cooler, damper, more bearable, until at last Sandy takes a swaying step forward, plants the haft of her scythe in the ground and is met with the giving warmth of fresh, clean earth.

She expects to feel relief, joy, elation. Exhaustion, maybe, the kind that comes after over-exerting herself for too long and finally being free to rest.

She expects to laugh, to cheer, maybe even to cry. She expects to—

She expects to feel _something_. Instead she feels hollow and numb.

Empty, confused, disoriented. It’s like there’s nothing left inside her.

Even here, surrounded at long last by real water. It doesn’t fill her, doesn’t soothe her mind or balm her throat, doesn’t mend the screaming of her leg or the churning of her stomach. She doesn’t feel anything.

Her legs shake. She grips her weapons tighter.

Tripitaka, clearly feeling all that elation Sandy can’t seem to find for herself, is beaming up at her, brighter than the sun. 

“See?” he says, giddy with joy. “We made it. We—”

“Survived,” Sandy finishes for him, automatic and numb.

She knows it’s true, but she’s not sure she really believes it. She certainly doesn’t feel like it is. Her legs don’t hurt any less now that her crutches are digging into earth instead of sand. Her skin doesn’t feel any less like it’s burning now that the sunlight comes reflected off water and not cutting through dust. The parts of her that have been on edge for days, struggling and scrabbling through all that the endless nothing, clinging so desperately to their resources, to food and water and strength, are no less tense now that they know she can hunt for more.

She can’t—

She’s not—

Tripitaka touches her.

He should know better than now, but apparently he is no quicker to learn than Pigsy. A hand on her arm, supportive and so, so kind, igniting the one thing inside of her she does feel, the one thing she does know.

Sandy lurches back, a dreadful whine-growl-hiss lodged in her throat.

Her weapons, the only things keeping her from falling, dig deeper in the strange, yielding earth. They find purchase, and so does she; a reflex that might have made her fall an hour ago in the desert now requires only the slightest repositioning of her body and crutches. After so many days of shifting, unstable sand, it is the strangest thing in the world to be supported so completely.

It does not make her feel any safer.

Recognising the bared teeth of survival in her, Tripitaka takes a long step back. Hands raised so she can see they’re empty, eyes wide and face tilted up so she can see and hear and recognise him for the friend he is. He may not yet have the self-control to stop these responses from rising up in her, but he’s getting much better at bringing her back down when they do.

“It’s okay,” he soothes, colouring his compassion with firmness. He sounds like he’s trying to calm a feral cat, a creature that needs strength as well as softness; if Sandy could speak right now she would tell him how much she appreciates that. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

Sandy closes her eyes, focuses on the words. She blocks out the greens and browns in front of her, the white-blue sky, the distant clouds. Blocks out the yellows and whites behind, the dry desert dust, the miserable void, the threat of dehydration and heat sickness.

She lets the words echo inside her head, _it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay_ , and slowly remembers how to breathe.

Tripitaka is right, she tells herself. They are safe now, out of the barren lands and back on living, breathing earth. They survived the wilderness, the wasteland, that place so full of nothing, hungry for their blood and their lives. They survived—

They survived.

Didn’t they?

Her senses tell her it’s true, but it still doesn’t feel real.

She feels strange all over. Like her body doesn’t really belong to her, like her limbs, her breath, her pulse are all parts of some peculiar machine, cracked and worn down by misuse. The only thing that feels real is the pain in her leg, and even that feels different now, against a backdrop of fresh water, cool earth, and damp grass.

It kept her going. _Survival_ , the only word she knew. It kept her walking on ravaged legs, kept her breathing through the dehydration and the exhaustion and the pain. It kept her focused, kept her moving, kept her alive.

Just like it always has.

She doesn’t know what to do without it.

It’s been all she has for so long.

She doesn’t know what it means, to not need it any more.

She’s never—

She looks down at Tripitaka, willing her sluggish mind to focus on his face, his eyes, his anything. He is her reason for being, her reason for surviving; for him, she will pull herself together.

She keeps her eyes on his, focuses as best she can, and wills her tongue to form words, to remind him of the one truth she can still comprehend, the one true thing she still holds inside of her.

“We need to find them.”

Tripitaka’s jaw gains a little tension. “Sandy...”

“We need to _find_ them.”

“We will,” he promises, no doubt realising there is no reasoning with her until she’s gotten this out of her system. “There’s a town on the horizon there. See—” He gestures, and Sandy struggles to find anything past his pointing finger. “You can see the monastery.”

Sandy can’t see anything, in fact, but she takes his word for it just the same.

The monastery: that’s where they’ll be, if they made it this far. The most important landmark of a town or village, visible even from great distances, a beacon for weary travellers to know that sanctuary lies ahead.

That’s where they’ll be, she thinks again. Sanctuary, haven, protection. _Healing_.

She still can’t make out the place; she can barely make out anything at all. She can’t blame her bleary vision on dehydration this time; she can feel the water in the air and beneath the ground. Perhaps it’s simply shock, her body reacting — or maybe failing to react — to their return to the world of the living, to the sweet sound of living water in her head, and all its blessed, beautiful creatures. Too much, perhaps? Overwhelming after so much silence, so much desperation and emptiness and pain, so much—

Her head throbs, a queasy pulse that finds the rhythm of pain in her leg.

Voice shaking, she says, “If that’s where they are, we need to go there.”

Tripitaka tilts his head, studying her closely. She thinks he’s trying to be subtle about it, keeping his face angled away rather than facing her directly, but he’s never been particularly talented at hiding; he couldn’t keep a secret if he tried, and he certainly can’t hide from her now. Tired and dirty as he is, he wears his feelings like a brand on his face.

“Can you make it?” he asks, and his voice is thick with all the worry he fails to hide from his features.

Sandy keeps her gaze on the swerving, blurring horizon. “I made it through the barren lands,” she reminds them both. “I kept Pigsy alive. I kept myself alive. I helped to keep you alive, I think. I survived the wasteland, the demons, the lack of resources. I survived injury, dehydration, exhaustion. I _survived_ —” The catch in her voice is painful enough that even Tripitaka grimaces. “Of course I can make it.”

Unsurprisingly, he does not seem convinced. “You don’t look well.”

Sandy stares at him, then gestures incredulously at her leg. “I’d be rather surprised if I did.”

“That’s not what I...” He sighs. “Never mind. If you say you can make it, I believe you.”

It is a transparent lie, but one that Sandy appreciates very much.

“Good,” she says, bracing on her borrowed limbs. “Let’s go.”

And she does, leaving him standing there in the fresh, new earth.

*

She doesn’t make it, of course.

She didn’t believe she would, any any more than Tripitaka did.

It’s not her leg this time, at least

At least, she’s fairly sure it’s not.

She doesn’t— 

She doesn’t really know what it is.

There is no reason for the sudden weakness in her body, no explanation for why she feels so wobbly and unsteady, why her vision won’t stay focused, why even her crutches are barely supporting her any more. She’s as well-fed as she’s been in days, thanks to Tripitaka, and with fresh, clean water within reach of her senses the dehydration has lifted like a veil.

Everything is back to the way it was before they crossed into the barren lands: calm and serene, tall trees and long grass, earth and water and life in all directions, a forest around her, the offer of sanctuary on the horizon.

She doesn’t need to survive here. The world is lush and plentiful, and she does not need to survive.

It is unfathomable. To her mind, yes, but to her body most of all. Without that basic, simple need, that singular point of focus, it doesn’t know what to do with itself. It’s been running itself into the ground, surviving on nothing for so long, it doesn’t know how to relax; it doesn’t know how to breathe without—

In her hand, Pigsy’s rake thrums with electricity. Her palm, damp with sweat and shaking with needless exertion, slips over the metal surface. The weapon — _his_ weapon — is unsteady and unstable, just like her.

And so, eventually and inevitably, she falls to the ground.

And then, with the crunch of impact, the resurfacing scream of all the pain she’s been holding at bay.

Well. Mostly holding at bay.

The pain that she intends to blame, guiltless though it is, when Tripitaka stops and whirls around, her name held like medicine under his tongue.

But he doesn’t ask. He doesn’t even look surprised.

The pain is real. Jolted out of her throat in strangled yelps as she hits the ground, it is very, very real. It may not be the reason she fell, but that doesn’t make it any less. For a long moment she is blind with it, breathless and gurgling, tasting blood on her tongue as she waits for the world to set itself right. She wonders, delirious, if it will ever get easier, if she will ever be able to trip, fall, stumble, without feeling her legs tearing themselves to pieces.

She thinks she will. She has lived through far worse than this, hasn’t she?

But it is so easy to forget what comfort feels like when it’s little more than a distant memory.

Much the same with survival, she supposes. It has been so much a part of her life for so long.

Without it, all that’s left is this: her, lying on the ground, clinging to pain.

Tripitaka doesn’t ask, doesn’t push, doesn’t press. He crouches down at her side, and the medicine-thick husk of her name slowly softens and grows fluid again, recognisable. Twice, he says it, then three times, a gentle repetition to give her something hold on to. Even if every other part of herself is flying apart, at least she still knows her name.

“Okay,” she rasps at last, when the pain has receded enough that her throat can open up again. “Sorry.”

Tripitaka shakes his head: no apology needed. “We’ll take a break here,” he tells her softly. “Can I...?”

He doesn’t wait for permission, doesn’t even bother to finish the question. It’s the only warning she gets, that half-asked question, and then his hands are all over her, stroking her back, repositioning her limbs, easing her upright and guiding her into a sitting position, back braced against a tree with her useless legs stretched out like dead branches in front of her.

“I would have said ‘no’.” Her voice is thick and slurry, as useless as her legs. “For the record.”

Tripitaka looks pained. “I know,” he says, but doesn’t apologise. “But I need to look you over.”

Sandy suspects he’s not really talking about her injuries, but he makes a show of examining both of her legs just the same. He unwraps the soiled bandages with his usual care, humming thoughtfully at the exposed flesh, never blanching or recoiling even for a moment. How well he understands what he’s looking at, Sandy can only guess; the Scholar claimed to know a great deal about such things, but she never let him get close enough to see whether it was true.

She wishes she had the same luxury here with Tripitaka.

She wishes she was brave enough to deny him anything.

She hears her own voice, as if from a great distance away, mumbling, “I’m sure it looks much worse than it is.”

“I’m sure it does,” Tripitaka says evenly. His palm, resting lightly on her left leg, just short of the worst of the damage, feels like a shock of cold air; Sandy wonders how hot her flesh is, that his seems so frozen. “But now we’re out of the desert, and since we’re stopped anyway, I think I’d like to do some foraging. See if I can find something to speed the healing process along.”

“Oh,” Sandy says numbly. “That’s not necessary.”

“I know.” He sounds like he’s just humouring her. “But I’d like to do it anyway. Is that okay?”

Sandy tries to smile, but her mouth won’t oblige. “I couldn’t stop you, even if I wanted to.”

Still, as he leans up to brush the damp, tangled hair out of her eyes, as he looks into them with fondness and thinly-veiled worry, she gets the impression he’s not just doing it for her.

He hesitates a beat, knees locked, like he wants to go but can’t bring himself to move. His face is too close; she blinks a few times to try and bring it into focus, without much effect.

“Will you be okay down here by yourself?” he asks. “I mean, it’s safe, but...”

Sandy’s stomach clenches. She grits her teeth, swallows hard, breathes slowly, steadily, like her heart will stop if she tries to do it too fast.

“All of a sudden,” she says faintly, “safe feels very dangerous.”

“I know.” It is not the first, or even the third time he’s said that. This time, however, it’s rich enough that she almost believes him. “But it’s all right. I promise. You’re just adjusting.”

A ridiculous notion, of course. That she — that anyone — would need to adjust to being safe again. That she would need to adjust to things like water and life, to hearing their whispers once again inside her head, blessed and beautiful like they never left. That it would be any kind of adjustment at all, to return to a world of not having to ration every drop, every scrap, every breath. That she would need to adjust to—

To, again, _having_ survived.

To survival being a thing of the past.

Apparently it doesn’t agree with her.

She only knows how to _be_ surviving.

To be in the middle of it, living it, to be struggling, suffering, seeing each second as potentially her last, to be slinking through the sewers or slipping into the shadows, to knowing safety only in the dark places, to having to seek it out herself, to having no-one, to—

She doesn’t know how to function when those things aren’t there, aren’t here, aren’t—

 _Now_.

Days in the barren lands with barely one good leg, limping between crutches that could destroy her if their powers turned against each other, keeping her one-time enemy alive and in one piece.

Trying to, anyway.

Trying to, because she is the reason he almost wasn’t. Because she—

Because survival is all she knows.

Survival and pain. Suffering it, inflicting it, enduring it, returning it.

Her whole life, over and over and—

Tripitaka tells her it’s safe here. He tells her that she is safe, and that Pigsy — assuming, with his usual human optimism, that he and Monkey made it to the monastery before his injuries claimed him — is safe too. He tells her, and he expects her to believe that the world — the violent, hateful place that tried so hard to destroy her for years and years and years— is now a safe place.

That it’s somehow understandable, that she has to adjust to this.

To being safe.

To being alive and whole and part of something bigger than her.

“I don’t know if I can,” she says.

It must be terribly exhausting, she thinks, to be Tripitaka. Faced again and again with such emotional regression, and from one who should be so much older than him. A companion who can’t let go of her past, who would assault a friend because he was once an enemy. A companion who can survive the ravages of the barren lands, crawl through them step by excruciating step, no matter the pain, and then immediately disappear into uselessness the moment the threat is past. A companion who cannot let go of the worst parts of her life, the survival and the pain, even when the world around her is supposedly safe.

What is she doing here, she wonders. Why has he allowed her to come this far without sending her back to the sewers and the shadows where she belongs?

She offered to leave. She tried to leave. But Pigsy left instead, and now...

And now she’s further back than she was before. And he is fighting for his life because she could not let go of her old, dark self, and everything is backwards and frightening and awful.

She doesn’t understand why Tripitaka only smiles and tells her, again, “It’s okay.”

“Is it?” Sandy sighs, feeling exhausted beyond all words. “I don’t know what is and isn’t any more. I don’t know...” She closes her eyes, wishes her breath would stop. “Is it really?”

Tripitaka pats her leg, minding the raw, exposed nerves. “Yeah. It really is.”

He shuffles back a little bit, then. Not far enough to make her feel like she can breathe, but far enough that he’s no longer touching her. He settles back on his haunches, catches his balance, then not-at-all-stealthily draws some more leaves from his pouch.

Sandy cocks her head, studying them with some suspicion. She thinks they look a little different to the others, though she can’t tell for sure; Tripitaka seems to know a lot about various plants and their uses — standard knowledge for a monk, she supposes, with so many lost souls to heal and so little ready medicine to heal them with — but Sandy has no such education.

“More pain relief?” she asks, testing the notion on her tongue and finding herself too weary to care if it’s right or not.

Tripitaka chuckles, light and without judgement. “Not exactly.”

There is a warmth to his smile now, and his voice, something that was markedly lacking just a moment ago; he likes curiosity, she realises. Perhaps he thinks of this knowledge as his last living tie to the Scholar, perhaps he sees her questioning as a hunger for education; perhaps he thinks, if she’s willing to learn, he might teach her more.

Sandy thinks she might not be entirely opposed to this.

“What then?” she asks, watching as he crushes the dried, delicate leaves between his palms, then drops the dregs into their waterskin and shakes it. “Will it affect my mind again?”

He hesitates. Only a beat, but it’s all the answer she needs.

“A little bit, maybe,” he admits after a moment, no doubt catching the unease on her face. “It won’t put you to sleep or anything like that, I promise. It’s just to help you, uh, relax.”

Sandy doesn’t understand. “I’m quite relaxed already.”

“You’re shaking,” Tripitaka points out. Gentle, still without judgement, but still the words sting. “You’re... I think you might be in shock. You’ve been pushing yourself so hard for days now, trying to stay alive in the desert, trying to keep Pigsy alive as well, rationing our supplies, your strength, everything. I don’t think your body understands that it’s safe now, that it no longer has to—”

 _Survive_.

Sandy bites down on her tongue to try and stop the shaking. “It’s possible.”

Tripitaka holds out the waterskin. An offer, not an order.

“Like I said, you’re just adjusting. And that’s okay, Sandy, it really is. But...”

Sandy eyes the skin warily. “You think this will help?”

“I think it can’t hurt.” He musters a watery grin. “But I also think it’s up to you. It’s your body, they’re your responses. If you’d prefer to just wait for this to burn itself out naturally, I won’t stop you. You have more experience than me with survival, you know?”

Sandy laughs, pitchy and slightly hysterical. “But you have more experience than me with being safe.”

She expects a polite chuckle, at least, but he only looks sadder, and nearly as drained as she feels.

“I’ll leave it with you,” he says. “While I go foraging. You can drink it if you like, but it’s okay if you don’t—”

“I will.”

The words burst out of her, unprompted and unplanned. Unwanted, too. She tries to take them back, but the waterskin is already pressed to her lips and by the time her mind catches up with her wayward, disobedient body, it’s entirely too late: her tongue is already flooding with the sharp-bitter mixture of water and nature.

She doesn’t even remember making the decision, but it is made now and she can’t undo it.

Tripitaka is staring at her, looking surprised but not shocked. “Well,” he says, with only the faintest hint of befuddlement. “All right, then.”

Sandy finishes the water, shakes the last few droplets onto her tongue, then hands it back.

“If you’re going to forage,” she explains, not even trying to hide her grimace, “it makes sense that you replenish our water supplies as well.”

“Oh.” His lips twitch; this time he manages to school them into stillness. “Right. Of course.”

He stands slowly, carefully, as though her unsteadiness has infected him somehow. Sandy watches him as he prepares to go, then lets her head fall back to strike the damp earth; the solidity is a surprise after so much dry sand, and the impact hurts rather more than she intended. A grounding pain, it helps her to feel out her body’s response, to the leaves and to Tripitaka’s looming absence.

“Be careful,” she says. “I can’t protect you if we’re separated. And we don’t know if it’s really—”

 _Safe_ , she doesn’t say. The word sticks to the roof of her mouth, as bitter-tasting as the herb water.

“Yes, we do,” Tripitaka says.

“You can’t possibly be sure.”

He sighs, clearly in no mood to make an argument of this, and says, rather generously, “All right. If it makes you feel more secure, why don’t you keep watch? Shout for me if you see anything, and I’ll come straight back. Okay?”

“Okay,” Sandy concedes. “But be careful as well, yes?”

“I always am,” Tripitaka says. “You know me.”

She thinks she does. Which is exactly why she worries.

He’s gone, though, before she can say so, leaving her alone with her doubts, the aftertaste of tainted water, and a body that will not stop shaking.

*

Tripitaka is right about one thing: the new herbs do not make her sleep.

They do, however, give her some peculiar dreams.

Sort of.

The bitter medicine-water concoction doesn’t help her to relax at all; it only makes her limbs heavy and sluggish. The heaviness makes her feel helpless, makes her heart hammer against the walls of her ribcage, makes her want to throw herself into the creeping shadows just to be sure there’s nothing lurking there.

She was vulnerable enough when it was only her leg that wouldn’t work; now the rest of her feels like it’s trapped inside some sticky substance, not exactly paralysed but just as helpless as if she were.

And this is supposed to relax her?

It does feel more like home, at least. Her old home, the one carved out of confusion and fear and hiding. She is long accustomed to being injured and helpless, sometimes exposed out in the open like this, on the days she couldn’t crawl back to her sanctuary in the sewers.

Tripitaka is almost certainly right: this place is safe. Still so close to the barren lands, still some ways away from the town darkening the horizon, what demons would make their home out here?

Safe, yes. This place, and the two of them here in it. But Sandy doesn’t know how to process ‘safe’; her body doesn’t know what it feels like, her mind doesn’t know how to recognise it. At least the dread that settles now in her disobedient body is familiar, the surreal sort-of numb slowness as the new herbs go to work. 

It’s not comfortable, not by any definition, but at least she knows and recognises the feeling of drugs slipping into her body and bending her thoughts. At least she remembers that. At least she...

She knows, too intimately for her own good, what it’s like to feel her mind start playing tricks on her.

She sees things that she knows aren’t really there. Threats, dangers, people. Every twitching blade of grass is a demon lurking, every whisper of wind is a human calling her a monster. Every time a leaf rustles high above her head, she flinches and twitches and wills her body into silence, into stealth, into hiding.

She sees him, Pigsy, his massive form silhouetted against a hollowed-out trunk. She sees his face so clearly, so vividly she knows it can’t really be real. The hardness in his eyes, the tight lines of his mouth, the way he used to look at her all those years ago, she sees it all again now, in the most unfathomable detail.

She hears his sigh, just like it was back then, the way he could shake all the air around him with a breath or the threat of a laugh. She sees it ignite, still shuddering with his voice, lit up with the lightning that crackles and hums around him.

She sees him looking down at her, seeing her weakness, her helplessness. Leaden-limbed and unable to move, drugged and hallucinating and vulnerable; he made her that way so many times, didn’t he? And he turns now to his guards, his humans, his cruel friends, and he grins and says, “Better her than me, eh?”

Just like he did back then.

Up there in his palace with his finery, his hearty meals and his warm comfortable bed. He would say it often when they mocked him for being soft-hearted, when he would evict people or haul gods off to their doom and fail to look them in the eye as he did it, when Sandy was trembling in the shadows, paralysed and unable to move, to help, to breathe.

He would look down at his victims — Locke’s, of course, not really his — and say it, over and over again, like he was trying to convince himself too.

“Better them than me.”

And then he would laugh, because his friends expected it of him.

Sandy knows that’s what survival means to him. He told her that.

Perhaps that’s why she sees him that way now. Whole and hale and healthy. Not the Pigsy of the barren lands, the one who called himself her friend, but the one who was her enemy. Untouched by her anger, untainted by her losses of control, not a mark on his body or a scratch on his face, no sign at all of the damage she inflicted. The only pain she sees in him now is the pain he inflicted on others.

It is the only version of him she really knows, the version she can’t let go. She clings to it, the memory of his terrible deeds, just as she clings to her own survival, to feeling unsafe, just as Tripitaka says she clings to pain. Because the moment it all stopped — the voices, the anger, the violence and the blood — all that was left was a silence so pure and so profound that her addled mind could not process it.

She sees him as he was, the monster who carved a worse one out of her bloodied bones, and she doesn’t know if it’s Tripitaka’s herbs or just her own mind desperately searching for something to be frightened of.

What she does know is that it works.

Her body holds itself in readiness, tense and iron-hard. She’s sure Tripitaka told her these herbs were supposed to relax her but this, she’s certain, is the opposite of being relaxed; it is the opposite of being safe, certainly the opposite of _feeling_ safe, but somehow she feels calmer like this — the strange comfort that comes with familiarity: fear, the one feeling she knows well — than she ever did when the world was still and silent and free of all its old threats.

Stupid, she knows.

To be calmer when she’s not relaxed, to feel safer in knowing she is not safe at all.

Backwards.

But then, perhaps that’s the herb water talking. Telling her things that aren’t true, making her see the world all wrong. The fear churns in her belly, gurgles in her chest, and it feels like home, it feels like the murky embrace of the sewers, the only place in all the world that ever wanted her. And it is fear, it is horror, it is dread, it is everything Tripitaka tells her she should not feel and should not want—

But it is so much easier, feeling the things she has felt her whole life, than trying to twist her body and her heart and her mind into shapes they’ve never known.

The wind catches in a nearby tree, drawing her attention back to the world around her, its illusory dangers and the very real responses deep inside her. The branches rattle and moan, and she thinks she hears Pigsy’s low, troubled voice telling his men to turn her into an example, to make her a scapegoat, a demon, a monster, and she thinks she hears Locke’s voice too, not nearly so low or so troubled, ordering him kill Tripitaka, to lock up the gods, to be good, and she thinks she hears—

“Sandy?”

 _Tripitaka_.

Not telling anyone to do anything. Just saying her name, like that’s enough.

Sandy blinks, and there he is. Real, she’s at least mostly sure.

“Oh,” she says, and blinks again to bring him into focus. “You came back.”

He blinks too, looking rather puzzled. “Was I gone too long?”

“I don’t know.” She wets her lips a couple of times, to try and make speaking easier. It doesn’t really work, but she keeps speaking anyway. “I don’t feel relaxed, Tripitaka. But I do feel better, I think. You were wrong: it’s not safe out there at all. And not being safe feels so much safer.” She nods sagely. “I suppose you’ll tell me that’s what really matters, yes? That I feel better?”

“Er... ” He stares at her for a long, long moment, then says, very slowly, “I think those herbs might affect gods more strongly than humans.”

Sandy lifts herself up as best she can, leaning back on her elbows and squinting crossly at him. “You think?” she echoes. “You don’t know?”

Tripitaka looks only the tiniest bit abashed.

“We haven’t exactly had many gods around over the last five hundred years,” he points out, admittedly quite reasonably. “Where would we get our test subjects?” Sandy shrugs, rather annoyed, and so Tripitaka adds, rather more apologetically, “I thought you would be less susceptible to things like this, not more. Your constitution outmatches ours by... well, by a lot.”

“Mm.” She stopped listening about halfway through the last sentence, but she doesn’t want him to know that, so she nods again. “Then I’m honoured to be your... what was it? ‘Test subject’?”

The words taste strange on her tongue, acrid and bitter, like it’s more of a threat than she understands. _Test subject_ , for some reason it conjures up visions of places cold and dark, of voices screaming in the shadows.

None of that here, though. Not with Tripitaka. Never with Tripitaka.

This she knows, even if she is more affected by things than a human.

He studies her for another few moments, face scrunched up like he can’t figure out whether to be amused or worried, then finally shrugs and crouches beside her. “So long as you’re feeling better.”

Sandy peers past him, squints up into the rustling trees, the lurking dangers, the threats that make her feel so unsafe and thus much safer. “Yes,” she says, slumping back to the ground. “I think I am.”

Tripitaka nods, then holds up what looks like a strip of fabric, visibly wet and smelling strange.

“I mixed up something for your leg,” he explains, still speaking slowly. “To try and soothe the pain.”

His reaches for her, then, before she has a chance to protest or ask any questions. The fabric — a new bandage, she thinks, wrapped tightly around the worst of the pain — feels horrible against her ravaged flesh, cold and slippery like the memory of damp fishing nets. Sandy tries to squirm away from the unpleasant sensation, but her body refuses to move.

“This is wholly unnecessary,” she grumbles.

Tripitaka’s expression flickers at that, like she just said something terribly sad.

“You always say that,” he says softly, “when I try to ease your pain.”

“My pain will ease itself,” Sandy counters, no less sullen. “As it always does.”

Unfortunately, Tripitaka is not looking at her impressive pout. He’s staring at her leg instead, at the mixture-soaked fabric as he wraps it around and around and around, at the way her muscles are clenching and spasming under his touch. Automatic; the pain is so intense she can barely feel the contact at all, but still her body responds as if each touch were a blow, a threat, a danger.

Fingertips poised at the edge of the new bandage, Tripitaka says, “Being safe is more than just being out of danger.”

Sandy wants to tell him ‘I know that’, but they both know it would be a lie; she knows nothing at all about being safe.

She says, instead, “I heal very quickly.”

At last Tripitaka lifts his head. He moves slowly, effortfully, like he has a terrible headache, and when he lets his eyes finally rest on her face he looks so sad and so pained. Like he’s feeling all the ravages of her bad leg in his own body too, like he’s trying to balm some invisible wound in himself by trying to soothe hers, trying to wrap up some unseen brokenness inside himself by binding her flesh in medicine.

“Sandy,” he sighs, releasing her leg and reaching instead for her face.

Sandy flinches, of course, resisting the contact like it’s a living flame.

“Don’t.” Her voice warbles, scared and small. She feels like the herb water, long since swallowed, is somehow still on her tongue, changing her words and twisting them into something different. “Please.”

Tripitaka pauses, fingertips less than a breath away from her skin.

“I won’t hurt you,” he says.

It’s a silly thing to say, Sandy thinks. Surely he must realise that she knows this, must know that it was never in question, that it’s not about being hurt by the palms that press to her cheek or caress her jaw, that it’s about being _not_ -hurt, about imagining for a moment that she might not have to be, that she might be _safe_ , and then—

And then.

“Neither did he,” she hears herself choke. “But somehow he still did.”

Tripitaka stares.

Blinks. _Blinks_ —

Then he yanks his hand back, lightning-fast, like she’s the one on fire.

“Oh,” he whispers. “Oh...”

Sandy’s head feels just light enough from the the herb water that she keeps talking in spite of herself, blurting out her painful truths where she would normally be ducking her head and hunching her shoulders and hiding.

“I thought he saw me,” she says. “He touched me, and it was like when you touch me: he was gentle, he was _kind_. Like he was afraid I’d break if he was too rough with me. And I thought... I thought...”

She thought it meant that she was safe.

But she wasn’t, and that was his doing.

He made sure she never felt safe again.

She doesn’t know how to explain this to Tripitaka. She wouldn’t know how to explain it to anyone, but it is especially tricky with Tripitaka, who feels so much and so deeply, who she is so desperate to not disappoint like she disappointed the Scholar before him. He looks at her like he feels every ounce of her pain, like he’s living it just like she did, and she wants to protect him from that, wants to save him from having to feel any small part of it, but she also wants so badly to help him understand.

She can’t, though. Speaking is difficult, even with her head unburdened by medicinal water; she’s never been able to make herself understood before, so why should she expect this time to be any different? Her tongue is clumsy, too thick in her mouth; it’s looser than usual, yes, but that doesn’t make it any easier to untangle her thoughts and crush them into words, to speak what she feels rather than simply feeling it. When has she ever been able to express herself well through speech?

Maybe she should try to write it down.

Maybe she should stop trying entirely.

Maybe— 

“I’m sorry,” Tripitaka says. “I shouldn’t... I know it’s a problem. I think... I think it’s maybe not as much about him as you want it to be. I mean, not _only_ about him. I think...”

He bites his lip, looking even smaller than he is. Helpless, sort, of, in the way of one who wants so badly to help but knows that he can’t. Sandy wonders if that kind of helplessness hurts less than the kind she knows.

“Thinking is difficult,” she says. “About him. About this, about everything. It’s so hard to think at all.”

“I know.”

Still, knowing it doesn’t stop either one of them from attempting it. They sit there together for a long, long time, both lost in their own thoughts, thinking even as they try not to.

Tripitaka tries to pretend he’s not. He bows his head over her leg once more, makes a show of examining the new bandage, like he doesn’t already know he’s made a perfect job of it. Sandy watches him from a dissociated distance, trying not to let the fuzziness of her mind overwhelm her, trying not to fall too deep into the things she’s still so sure she can see in the shadows, in the trees, in the whispers of the wind.

Finally, because the silence is growing too heavy to bear, she says, “I don’t know if I want him to live or not.”

Tripitaka’s hands freeze, hovering over her leg like he’s afraid to try and touch her again and just as afraid to pull away. His expression doesn’t change, but he’s close enough that she can feel the tension running through him.

“I see,” he says, in a strange, subdued voice.

Sandy tries to smile for his sake, without success. “You can say it,” she says, trying to make it a little easier for him to feel such revulsion. “I know it’s an awful thing to think. As a monk, it must upset you dreadfully.”

“It does, yes.” At least he’s smart enough not to try and deny it. His honesty speaks well of him, and makes the words easier to swallow. “But not for the reason you’re probably thinking.”

Sandy laughs hollowly. “Because it’s unbecoming of one on a holy path to wish harm on others, no matter what harm they may have inflicted in turn.” Her vision blurs, pricked with salt. “The Scholar’s words, yes?”

Tripitaka’s surprise is a tangible thing, faintly amusing. “This you remember?”

“I remember everything he told me,” Sandy says. “His words were powerful.”

“They were,” he agrees, understandably subdued now that the conversation has shifted to his own past and his own personal pain. “He would have wanted you to show kindness and compassion, even to someone who hurt you. I want that for you as well. But I also understand that it’s not that simple. And I’m sure the Scholar would too.”

“No.” This she knows. This, too, she remembers. “He did not.”

Tripitaka flinches. Actually flinches, just like Sandy does when he tries to touch her, when someone tries to speak to her, when the world becomes sharp and full of danger. He looks devastated, like she’s just ripped a hole in something precious and beautiful, leaving him incomplete. 

She would give anything to take back all that grief and pain, but not at the cost of her own: she will not rewrite her memories so that his burn less hot.

“Oh,” he manages.

Sandy swallows raggedly. “He kept telling me that Pigsy was a prisoner too. That he was a victim. Of circumstance, of Locke, of any one of a thousand different things, but always a victim. That he was...” Her voice cracks; whether because of the herb water or simply the flood of feeling, she finds she doesn’t care. “That he was just like me.”

Tripitaka’s breath catches, then grows still in his chest.

“Oh,” he says again.

It’s a different word this time, though. Quieter, more reverent, not so full of pain. And when Sandy leans up to try and catch his eyes, she finds them soft and reverent too. Twinkling slightly, the way they do sometimes when he remembers the Scholar, when he thinks of him with fondness and warmth and love.

“You agree with him,” she realises out loud. “You think he’s right. Was right, even then. That even when he was still doing those things, Pigsy was still a victim and a prisoner. That he was...”

But she cannot — no, _will not_ — say ‘like me’.

Tripitaka turns his face away, taking the sparkle of his eyes with him.

“I do,” he says, quietly but with conviction; he knows this will hurt, but he can’t deny his truth any more than Sandy could deny hers, even to lessen her pain. “I do think he was right. I think Pigsy’s life and his choices were more complicated than any of us will ever really know. But just because I think that’s true... I still understand why you don’t. Why you maybe can’t.”

Sandy’s head is filled with static noise, the crackle and hum of electricity, of lightning waiting to strike. She shakes it, trying to clear it, but that only makes things worse.

She tries to look at Tripitaka’s words — at the Scholar’s words, from so long ago — for the revelation they are, a new version of a truth she can add to her own, but she can’t. She only hears the affirmation of what she didn’t want to hear, what she can’t bear to think of as any kind of truth at all, what maybe a part of her does know and understands but still can’t accept.

“So he is a victim,” she whispers, feeling dizzy. “And I may have killed him.”

It’s all backwards, she thinks. It’s backwards, it’s sideways, and it’s so wrong.

Tripitaka exhales, a shaky sigh that catches the air. “It’s not as simple as that.”

“You and the Scholar seem to think it is.” She can’t breathe. All she can think is that he was right, that she really was the monster he wanted her to be. “He’s a victim, and I’m the one who may have killed him. So what does that make me?”

Tripitaka, beautiful, faith-holding monk that he is, doesn’t hesitate even for a second.

“The same thing you’ve always been,” he says, with a Scholar’s kindness. “A god in pain.”

Sandy tries to laugh. Her throat feels razed, as parched now as it was in the barren lands.

“Only that?” she rasps, feeling tears burn behind her eyes. “Not a demon? Not a monster?”

Tripitaka is blinking back tears too. They make him look like something otherworldly, ethereal and sort of breathtaking. Looking at him, Sandy feels like she’s staring at a true god, not the fallen, wasteful creature that Pigsy became, or the wretched animal-thing that she was and still is. Not arrogant and puffed up on vanity like Monkey, not like any of them. Better, she thinks, than all three of them combined, and she feels so unworthy of looking upon him.

“None of those things,” he whispers. “Not then, and not now.”

And he climbs back up to his feet, because he knows that’s what she needs, and turns his face to the horizon so she won’t see him start to cry.

*


	13. Chapter 13

*

It takes longer for them start moving again than it does to reach the monastery once they do.

The herb water is starting to wear off by the time Sandy struggles back up to her feet, and a great deal of the remaining journey is spent fighting off its aftereffects: disorientation, confusion, and a dull, queasy headache that will not subside. It is unpleasant, to be sure, but it does offer a much-needed distraction from even more unpleasant things: the relentless, unbearable throbbing of her leg — no less for Tripitaka’s attempt at a poultice — and the equally unbearable silence from the monk beside her.

“Your mixture isn’t working,” she accuses, after a particularly unsteady step sends a bolt of agony straight through her.

It’s only to break the silence, really, and to vent a little bit of her misery, but Tripitaka would not be Tripitaka if he didn’t respond to everything with absolute seriousness.

“I’m sorry,” he says, looking down at her carefully-wrapped leg, like its uselessness is his fault. “But at least the herb water did some good, right?”

Sandy grunts. “I don’t know that I would call what it did ‘good’ by any meaningful definition.”

Apparently the look on her face strikes something in the monk’s tender heart because he becomes suddenly achingly soft at the sight of her. Still serious, just as he always is, but it’s gentler now. Sandy finds the softness rather more difficult to swallow, in truth, but she doesn’t want to upset him by saying so.

“I know you think it didn’t relax you,” he says, “but it did get you to open up a little.”

Sandy scowls, not nearly so impressed. “And hallucinate.”

“And—” He stops, squinting at her sideways. “Wait, _what_?”

Sandy thinks of the flickering shadows and the enemies she imagined skulking there, of the whispers in the wind twisted into voices, of the phantasmal visions of Pigsy standing over her, of the way her mind bent every little piece of the world around her into something huge and frightening and terrible. She thinks of what it meant: that she is clinging, just as Tripitaka told her, to the pain and the fear, that her mind would rather make itself unsafe than accept that it might be safe.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.

So they don’t.

Instead, more silence. No less heavy, but somehow less weighted. And though the sticky substance wrapped around her leg does little to ease the pain, still Sandy’s steps grow stronger, her pulse quickening as they break out of the forest and back into the sunlight, blinking the shadows out of their eyes to find the monastery towering over them, a powerful but soundless presence full of prayers and promises.

Sandy takes no shame in admitting her breath catches, so much that it almost stops completely.

Perhaps because Tripitaka, lurching to a halt beside her, looks just about ready to pass out too.

Sandy swallows, then refocuses all her attention onto him. “Um. Do you need a moment?”

He nods, as unashamed of his needs as she is of her awe. Sandy feels awed again at the sight of him, the way he shows his feelings so brazenly and so unguarded; she feels like there is no place here for shame or self-consciousness, like neither one of them should have any reason to hide any pieces of their hearts. A terror of a concept, Sandy thinks, to be left so vulnerable, but Tripitaka looks so radiant in his openness that she doesn’t say so.

“Yeah.” His voice shudders a little, the familiar quaver of the thoroughly overwhelmed. “I’m sorry. It’s just... I haven’t been in one of these since...”

He doesn’t finish.

No matter; Sandy understands. She, too, is thinking of the Scholar, of the monastery that was his home, the hearth he loved so deeply and so completely. She remembers the passion in him when he spoke about it, the shining devotion of a holy man for the most holy place in all the world.

At least, the most holy place in his.

She wishes she could comfort the young monk he left behind, but all she can think of to say is, “I never saw it.”

Tripitaka startles, looking surprised. “Really?”

“Mm.” Sandy wets her lips, feely suddenly, inexplicably shy. “Too dangerous.”

So the Scholar told her, anyway. And she knows — in some tiny rational corner of her mind, at least, though that knowledge never quite reached her aching, oft-abandoned heart — that it was the truth. She was a god, and one cursed with the face of a demon: it was dangerous enough if she was seen in daylight at all, she had scars enough to prove that, but to be seen in a monastery? Worse, a monastery rumoured to be harbouring some of the most significant figures of the resistance?

She would have brought destruction down upon them all.

She knows this, and not simply because he told her so.

He risked his life for her. Just by coming to see her, even rarely, he risked discovery, destruction, devastation. It made her feel important and worthless, and somehow both at the same time; she couldn’t fathom why she mattered so much, why he would risk so much simply to see her, to try and talk to one who could barely speak, to try and teach a wretch of a monster who refused to learn. She did not understand—

She still doesn’t. Now that he’s gone, she’s not sure she’d want to.

“I’m sorry,” Tripitaka is murmuring, his soft, sad voice bringing her back to herself. “You would have liked it, I think. It was quiet there. Peaceful. No-one would have bothered you.”

The thought strikes deeper than Sandy anticipates. She tries to picture a place like that, a sanctuary of solitude by choice and compassion, of humans willing to leave her in peace just because she asks for it. It is unfathomable, impossible to even imagine being so safe or so cared for.

Small wonder that the Scholar would want to protect such a place. Small wonder he would never allow her to see it. A place so pure and perfect and peaceful... a monster like her would only ruin it.

She accepts the loss along with his. Nods, breathes, and looks up at the more present monastery, the one that wasn’t destroyed, the one they must enter if they wish to find their friends and learn their fates.

“I can go in alone,” she suggests, because Tripitaka seems to be on the brink of tears.

She doesn’t expect him to accept, of course, but she thinks — _hopes_ — it means something that she would offer. That she would place his discomfort first, that she would at least make an attempt at showing empathy.

Indeed, perhaps it does: the tremulous, tear-filled look dissolves, and he finds a smile.

“I’ll be all right,” he assures her, glowing once more with his usual warmth. “But thank you for offering. I’m sure you understand what it’s like, to suddenly see a place that reminds you of...”

“...better times?” Sandy’s throat clenches; suddenly it’s hard to speak. “I don’t know if I do.”

Tripitaka’s hands twitch at his sides. Sandy recognises his yearning for contact, for connection; she wishes she could give him that, wishes she could set aside her own discomfort, just this once, and bend to his instead.

But she can’t. And it brings her shame and solace all at once that he seems to understand that.

“I was going to say ‘things you’d sooner forget’,” he whispers, hiding his hands behind his back. “But yes, better times as well. Whatever else I might say about my time there, the monks and the hard work and all those things... it was a good home. A real home. I wish...”

“So do I.” Sandy’s throat tightens again. Her vision is blurred. She’s not sure exactly what he was going to say, but it doesn’t matter: anything he wishes, so does she. “I’m glad you had one.”

“Me too.” He says it with weight, like he knows exactly how much of a blessing it is and understands it’s one she never had a chance to know. His eyes gleam as he looks at her, pity and pride and his own nostalgic pain, then he braces himself, takes a deep breath, and says, “Shall we go in?”

Sandy swallows. It doesn’t ease the tension in her throat at all. She feels suddenly terrified, overwhelmed by a dozen different fears all at once, each one more contradictory than the last.

“What if they’re in there?” she whispers, hating the tremors in her voice, hating even more the way they’re echoing the ones in her chest. “What if they’re not? What if he’s alive? What if he’s _not_? What if—”

“What if any of those things,” Tripitaka says, cutting her off before she can drift too deep into her senseless despair. It’s not a question, and he doesn’t wait for an answer. “You said it yourself, Sandy: you don’t know what you want. If he’s alive, if he’s not... you’re not going to figure out how you feel about it until we go inside and see which one’s real.”

Sandy shakes her head, swallows again. Her mouth is as dry as it was in the barren lands, choking on the worst of the dehydration.

“You’re right,” she says. “I know you’re right, I do know that. It’s just...” She closes her eyes, hides her face, and then in a blurted-out confession she could never share with anyone else in the world, she mumbles, “I’m afraid.”

She doesn’t need to look up to know that Tripitaka is smiling, that he sees this as a kind of growth. She doesn’t know that she feels the same way about it, and she lacks the strength to try and figure it out.

“I’m afraid too,” he whispers, conspiratorial and breathless. “But it’s okay. Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it together. Okay?”

It should be, yes. Sandy knows this.

It’s all she’s ever wanted, isn’t it? Standing by his side, Tripitaka’s side, helping him and supporting him. Nearly her whole life spent in misery and suffering, hiding from humans and demons alike, with nothing but his name to feed her body and spirit and mind, the only balm she ever had for the wounds that didn’t break the skin, the only thing that helped against the fear and the anger, the loneliness, the pain, the despair. The greatest gift the Scholar ever gave her: Tripitaka, standing here by her side.

It should make it okay.

But it doesn’t, and she doesn’t understand why.

*

Inside the monastery, she is struck by the smell of sandalwood.

Before she even registers the presence of human life, before she hears a footstep or a voice or the echo of a drawn-in breath, the sandalwood scent hits her and she sees the Scholar’s face.

Memory, as vivid as her worst-best-deepest dreams, rises up and swallows her whole.

His smile, his warmth. His exuberance when he spoke of the resistance, when he spoke of gods and heroes and changing the world, the way his entire spirit would light up when he said the name ‘Tripitaka’ and with that single word redirected the course of her life.

The not-so-warm moments too. His disappointment, never concealed quite as well as he thought it was, when she could not learn his lessons.

She knows he’d hoped for someone better. Someone more deserving of the quest, more worthy of Tripitaka, more fitting of the life he was offering. A purer heart, a kinder soul, a gentler body. Someone who was made for the world like a tool or a medicine, not carved out of it like a weapon. He wanted someone who could be compassionate, who did not flinch at touch or kindness. He wanted—

But of course he had no choice. There were so few gods in the world, and fewer still with each passing day; he could not afford to be so picky.

Beside her, no doubt pulled in by the same scent-memory, Tripitaka’s breath catches in his chest.

“Oh,” he whispers. His voice, like his breath, seems to stutter, tearful and awestruck, reverent and tragic, beautiful and broken; Sandy hears a thousand contradictions all in one syllable, and her heart aches and trembles for him. “Oh...”

She wants to touch him, she realises. She wants to take his hand, squeeze it, remind him that he’s not alone. She wants to do for him what she knows he would do for her, what she knows she wouldn’t allow.

But she can’t. Even if she had the compassion or the kindness, even if she had the will and the strength of heart. Even if she had learned all of the Scholar’s lessons a thousand times over and become the god he wanted, she can’t. Both of her hands are busy, clinging to the weapons that keep her upright; if she lets go of either one, she will crash to the ground and humiliate them both.

“Are you all right?” she asks him instead.

It is not enough. She feels helpless and she hates herself so much she can’t breathe.

Tripitaka looks up at her, blinking rapidly.

“Yeah.” His voice catches again, then grows a little steadier, like he’s drawing strength from the word, making it real by making it heard. “Are you?”

Sandy doesn’t answer.

She forces herself to focus instead on what really matters. Not the smell of sandalwood, not the murmuring echoes of the Scholar’s voice or the still-heavy shadows of his disappointment. Not the past but the present, the quest she was chosen for, worthy or not, and a monastery that the Scholar probably never even saw in his life.

“We should...” she starts, then flounders.

"Yeah.” He lets out a breath, shaky but determined. “Stay here, okay? I’ll... uh...”

But it seems that neither one of them can finish a sentence in this holy place.

Sandy doesn’t try to speak again. She just does what she’s told: stays and waits.

Efficient even in this, Tripitaka makes a beeline for the nearest cluster of monks. They’re huddled over an altar nearby, glancing up every now and then to take stock of their new visitors before returning to their devotions. Set at ease, no doubt, by the sight of Tripitaka’s robes, they seem content to let them take what time they need without pressing for introductions.

Tripitaka greets them softly and politely, speaking with a strange sort of deference, like he doesn’t really see himself as one of them. Like a novice, perhaps, bowing to address a great teacher.

Sandy doesn’t really understand, but then she supposes that’s to be expected; the only monk she knew before Tripitaka was the Scholar. She’s never seen their kind talk to each other directly.

He introduces them briefly, explains their situation in the broadest possible strokes, then proceeds to ask the question gurgling like nausea in Sandy’s belly.

“We’re looking for our friends,” he says, very carefully. “One of them was quite badly injured. We’re hoping they made it here to find help. They’re both... that is to say, uh, they...”

The tallest of the monks raises a bemused eyebrow. “The gods?”

His voice is even, lacking inflection; clearly their inhuman nature is not a threat to this place or its denizens. Rather understandably, his indifference makes Tripitaka slump with relief.

Sandy, watching from the doorway, finds her own feelings are not quite so straightforward. A little relief, to be sure, in knowing that she won’t be chased from this place or sold off to the highest-paying demon, but there is a flood in her chest of so many other conflicting emotions — none of which she could name if pressed — that it entirely overwhelms the reprieve of knowing this place is safe.

It is good, she’s certain. Their friends are known, they are almost certainly here, and they are still _they_ , plural. All these things speak of good news, but her mind and body can’t seem to process it at all.

“That’s them,” Tripitaka gets out, when he’s able to find his voice again. “Are they well?”

Sandy’s body takes on a life of its own: it lurches forward, wobbling between her crutches so precarious she almost falls, and she hears her voice rise up to the high, arched ceiling: “Is he _alive_?”

Tripitaka looks back at her over his shoulder. “Sandy,” he hisses, a low warning.

Sandy ignores him. She’s staring at the monks, feeling frantic and feverish, and she can’t seem to stop herself from pressing, “Did he survive what I... that is, what happened to him?”

The monk’s eyes widen with horror at the sight of her. Understandable, if it were her face or her frenzy that disturbed him — she is long accustomed to such things — but where she expects him to respond with anger, fear, or discomfort, he simply says, with earnest concern, “You’re wounded.”

Sandy waves him away, as best she can with both hands occupied. “Our companion. Please. Is he alive?”

“I...” He glances at Tripitaka, who nods at him to answer. “Yes. Yes, of course. His injuries were very serious, but we have methods of...” His eyes fall to her leg again, and he clears his throat delicately. “Forgive me, but wouldn’t you prefer to have this conversation while receiving treatment for your own?”

Sandy laughs. The sound has a high, manic quality, and probably does nothing to convince anyone that she’s in her right mind, or in any condition to understand what her body does or does not need. Indeed, when she tries to meet the monk’s eye, he ducks his head, reeling and stepping back, like there wasn’t already half the building between them.

Like it doesn’t matter if there were three buildings, three continents between them. Like he’s seeing her now as the thing she becomes when her face catches the light: a threat, a monster, something frightening and dangerous and hideous, something to avoid or fear or hate.

Like humans always do.

Even in a place of a worship — a sanctuary, so the monks call it — there are some who will never be safe.

A credit, she supposes, that he doesn’t simply ask her to leave.

She shakes off the thought, swallows down the lifetimes-old instinct to show her teeth, to become the monster they always see anyway, to make herself a warning so he’ll continue to back away and give her the space her body so desperately needs.

The only safety in the world comes from distance, she’s learned a thousand times, from causing fear instead of feeling it; these are the only definitions of the word she has ever understood, and it takes a great force of will to swallow down those instincts and pretend she’s not the frightening thing he sees.

“I have crawled through the barren lands on these injuries,” she tells him. Steady, even, soft; she mirrors his tone perfectly so that he might see her instead as something like him. “They can surely wait another few minutes for treatment. I want to know where my companions are. I want to see them. I—”

“Sandy.” Apparently sensing how close her old survival instincts are to the surface, Tripitaka darts back to her side. He touches her without permission, a restraining hand on her arm, and hoists himself up to his full height, trying to draw her attention away from his fellow monk. “They’re here. They’re here and they’re safe. All right?”

Sandy ignores him. She doesn’t even bother trying to shake off his hold. She’s still staring at the other monk, the one who won’t look at her and won’t give her a straight answer.

“Take me to them,” she grits out. “ _Now_.”

Tripitaka tightens his grip: a warning now. Sandy bites down on the urge to flinch — or, worse, to retaliate — and holds on a little tighter to her makeshift crutches. All of the monks are staring at her, even the ones on the far side of the room, more than a few of them eyeing the weapons with nervousness. Understandable, she supposes: who would trust one so clearly unstable with such powerful weapons?

The thought of being separated from the only thing keeping her upright makes her nervous, but she needn’t worry; they seem to realise her position is unique because none of them make any move to try and liberate them from her, and though they all keep a safe, uneasy distance they’re polite enough not to mention them.

“She means no harm,” Tripitaka says, hoping to reassure. “I swear. She’s just... she’s been through a lot. And she’s in a great deal of pain.”

He’s not just talking about the barren lands, Sandy thinks, or her leg.

Perhaps the monks realise this too, because they stop staring quite so hard and a few of their faces soften into a kind of empathy. It swerves uncomfortably close to pity, not unlike the kind she used to see sometimes in the Scholar, in those moments when she failed to learn another lesson in compassion and he in all his monastic wisdom traced it back to a particular deprivation or a particular moment or a particular kind of violence, abuse, horror, _pain_ —

The shudder that wracks her, here in this place that smells so much like him, is too much to even try and hide.

“Take me to my companions,” she says again. No violence left in her now, she just sounds small and tired. “Please.”

They look to Tripitaka. His grip slackens on her arm, just a little.

“It’s okay,” he says, for the first time to them instead of her.

And so, taking their cues from him, they nod and do as she asks.

*

They’re escorted to a quiet, secluded alcove at the very back of the monastery, well out of the way of the main chambers.

“An infirmary?” Tripitaka guesses as they pause outside the closed door.

“Of a sort,” one of the monks affirms. His expression is sober, and his eyes dart from Tripitaka to Sandy and then back again, as though unsure which of the two he should be speaking to. “We don’t often get visitors, but when we do they’re usually in need of aid.” He hesitates, then bows his head, lips moving in a sad, silent prayer. “Of one kind or another.”

Tripitaka’s features slacken with understanding; he, too, bows his head. Sandy, lacking his patience or his affection for his fellow human beings, does no such thing.

“Are they in there or not?” she snaps.

Tripitaka jerks his head up, shooting her a look that borders on actually angry. “Sandy!”

The monk shakes his head. He’s still keeping a noticeable distance from her, and he hasn’t quite managed to wipe all the nervousness from his face, but at least he’s trying.

“It’s no matter,” he says to Tripitaka. “Your friend’s distress is perfectly understandable.”

Compassion, Sandy thinks. Even for one who has given him no reason to show it. She recalls the Scholar, the scent of his robes so much like this place and its people, and her stomach ties itself into embarrassed knots.

“I’m sorry,” she says, not to anyone who’s here.

If they hear, they don’t acknowledge it. Tripitaka narrows his eyes but acquiesces to let the disrespect slide, and the monk, turning back to the task at hand, gently pries the door open.

For a moment, Sandy can’t see. Panic floods her vision with white, and all she can hear is the thundering of her heart, the scrape of her weapons on the floor. A moment of nothing but that, blindness and deafness and sick, sick dread, and then—

“Well, look who finally made an appearance!”

And then _Monkey_ , bounding across the tiny room with a big, bright grin on his face.

Tripitaka, coming into focus at Sandy’s side, smiles back. “Glad to see you made it.”

“Likewise.” His grin dims a little, then, and he turns to gesture at one of the few small pallets that serve as beds. Sandy can make out Pigsy’s form, unmistakable even in its stillness and silence, buried under a thin, moth-eaten blanket. “As you can see, we’re all in one piece.”

“Are you?” Sandy hears herself squeak, unable to look at the pallet. “Both?”

Monkey hums. He’s mostly occupied with looking Tripitaka up and down, making sure the monk is still more or less intact, but he glances up to examine her too with similar seriousness. A quick look at her face, a slow descent down her body, and a lingering frown at her leg... then, satisfied that she’s not about to keel over right in front of him, he nods.

“Yeah.” There’s a flicker of tension in his voice, though, so faint that Sandy suspects only another god could hear it. “Yeah, both of us. All good now.”

Sandy bites down on her tongue. She still can’t find the courage to check for herself. “Really?”

“Really.” Sharper now, with an edge that cuts, like he can sense she’s on the brink of something overwhelming and is trying to bring her back before she drowns. “Lie down, will you? You’re making the place look untidy.”

“Please do,” one of the monks interjects, speaking rather more to Tripitaka than to Sandy. “Make yourselves comfortable. You can rest from your journey, and we can tend to your wounds—”

“That’s not necessary,” Sandy says automatically.

No doubt her clenched teeth speak louder than her words, because even the most nervous and twitchy-looking of the monks raise their brows.

“Please,” another repeats, rather more insistent than his brother. “It is our nature to attend to those in need. What we lack in supplies, our healers make up for in their talent and dedication.”

Monkey nods, looking haunted. “They brought the big lug back from the grave,” he says, blanching pale. “Twice.”

Sandy’s stomach lurches. She turns away from him as quickly as her wrecked body will allow, unable to endure the sight of his pale face, his clenched jaw, his seriousness. 

She turns back to the monks instead, watching them watch her, feeling exposed. They’re still looking at her leg, sober but sort of clinical; nothing like Tripitaka or the Scholar, the only other experience she has with holy men, but like she would expect from real healers, the kind who claim to know impossible things about the body and its workings. Studying her, like she is nothing more than her injuries, her flesh and bones and blood, a specimen waiting to be dissected.

“I don’t need your healers,” she grits out. “I’m a god. I can heal by myself.”

Tripitaka sighs. “She doesn’t like to be touched,” he explains apologetically.

Their features soften again, like they did before. Like they’re putting together pieces of a puzzle she can’t see, hearing unvoiced truths in the little tidbits Tripitaka keeps feeding them. Like maybe they’re all speaking some strange secret language known only to humans or holy men. She wonders how much of her life is on display, how much of her past they can see or imagine that they understand. Like the Scholar before him, Tripitaka assumes he knows so much, assumes he sees everything, assumes he understands—

She grits her teeth, swallows, and forces herself to look at Pigsy, blanket-covered and motionless on his pallet.

“You had to bring him back?” Her voice trembles; her leg, already protesting so much stillness, shudders as well. “Really?”

They glance at each other, but don’t answer directly. Like the Scholar, like Tripitaka; Sandy wonders if their secret language is really no language at all, simply speaking without saying anything at all.

“Your friend was in a bad state,” one of them says at last, maddening in his evasiveness. “But have no fear. He’s stable now, and recuperating nicely.”

“He’ll be back on his feet in no time,” Monkey adds, though the pitchiness of his voice makes it clear he’s not completely convinced himself. “Unlike you, if you don’t shut up and get off yours.”

Being rather better equipped than the little humans in dealing with Sandy’s particular sort of stubbornness, he doesn’t give her the chance to protest or dig her heels in. He steps right into her personal space, hauls her up into his arms without so much as a word of warning, and carries her like a sack of potatoes to a nearby pallet.

Behind her, over the clatter of her weapons hitting the ground, Sandy hears Tripitaka suck in his breath. “Monkey, don’t...”

The panic is in his voice as well, not just his breathing. The air seems to grow solid around him, tensing in harmony with his body, and Sandy knows that he assumes the worst kind of response from her. Violence and anger and fear, an exploding waterskin or a scream, another lapse of control. Perhaps he’s even afraid that this place, this holy sanctuary for the wounded, will meet the same fate as the demons and their god-holding prison.

And why wouldn’t he think that? Hasn’t she done all of those things already? Hasn’t she made it perfectly clear that contact without permission leads to pain for everyone? 

He has no reason to assume it would be any different with Monkey than it is with himself, with Pigsy, or with these strange, well-meaning humans who claim to want to help.

It is different with him, though. It is always different with him.

Sandy still isn’t entirely sure why that is, only that when Monkey hauls her away — not gentle, not kind, none of the things she would expect from well-intentioned touches — she doesn’t tense or flinch, and when he sets her down on a pallet a short distance from Pigsy’s she does not resist at all. Nor does she recoil when he leans over her and flicks her forehead, as he has done so many times. No compassion in that, either: the snap of discomfort is teasing and playful, meant to defuse the tension.

The tension that exists only in Tripitaka, not Sandy.

“It’s all right,” she says to him, feeling disoriented.

Tripitaka furrows his brow, but lets it go without further question. Perhaps he simply assumes she’s grown comfortable in Monkey’s arms after the brief time he carried her around in the barren lands. Perhaps he sees something she doesn’t, some odd nuance in their friendship that Sandy is in no condition to grasp for herself. Whatever the reason, he accepts it for what it is, no doubt happy just to see her laying down at last and not complaining about it.

“You really should let them take a look at your injuries,” he says, once she’s settled.

Sandy flinches. Monkey, catching the shift in her, hastily retreats to the other side of the room. He doesn’t say anything, but she can tell by the way he’s not looking at her that he’s in agreement with Tripitaka. He is smart enough to know not to push it like the monk does, but it speaks volumes that he keeps his mouth shut; usually the first to grin and roll his eyes and say ‘leave her be’, his silence now is a condemnation all its own.

Sandy tries not to feel too betrayed. “I don’t need healing,” she insists. “I’ve suffered far worse injuries than this, and have always recovered without intervention.”

Without _human_ intervention, she really means.

And she means: all on her own, entirely alone.

And she means—

She means the words between the words: _no_ and _don’t touch me_ and _I don’t trust you_ , pain and experience and a thousand sharp teeth all wrapped up in stubbornness, in being good enough, strong enough, powerful enough to endure — to survive — all by herself.

She means that she has to. 

She never let the Scholar touch her either.

Even at her worst, the rusted blades of demons or humans leaving her broken or bleeding or semi-conscious, even when he swore that he would treat her with kindness, that he would only touch as much of her as was necessary for healing. She never trusted him with her wounds or her thoughts, her fear or her pain, and she certainly never trusted him with her skin.

Even at her worst, her most desperate or hungry or lost, she would not let him touch her.

Even at his best, his kindest, his softest, his most compassionate, she could not trust him.

Even when he was the one who shouldn’t have trusted her.

*

She thinks about it later, once they’ve finally left her alone.

Well, her and Pigsy.

Soundless, motionless, lifeless Pigsy. Buried under his blankets, his face and body obscured from view; she can’t see him at all, and yet somehow his presence pervades all of her senses.

They assure her he’s well.

They assure her that he’s just recovering, that he’s just sleeping, that he just needs his rest.

She’s too afraid to go over there and check for herself.

Not that she could, even if she had a mind to: she doesn’t have enough strength left to sit up, much less stand and drag herself over to his side. Her body, having finally found itself in a place where it doesn’t have to be hyper-alert at all times, refuses to heed her commands for it to move, to shift, even to roll over; she is as much a victim to its weakness here as Pigsy was a victim to its strength when her instincts caught fire.

The monks have left her to herself. She’s forbidden them from touching or trying to heal her mangled leg, but just like Tripitaka they’ve found a way to help just the same: on the small table beside her pallet, they’ve deposited a handful of Tripitaka’s leaves. The sleep-giving, pain-killing ones, not the other.

“In case you’d care for some relief by your own hand,” one of them said, and Sandy crossed her arms and insisted they would not be necessary.

A part of her wants to give in and take them.

The rest...

She feels strange. Numb and sort of shivery, like her body is trying to wring out a fever. Unsteady and uncertain; she keeps glancing at Pigsy’s pallet, keeps trying to catch a glimpse of him, keeps trying to—

She doesn’t want to look at him, but she can’t seem to stop.

Would she feel better, she wonders, or worse, if she could check on him? Would it bring her comfort or pain to hear his breathing for herself, to feel his pulse, to watch his eyelids moving as he dreams?

His silence is deafening.

Her own, almost worse.

Monkey and Tripitaka are long gone as well, ostensibly to leave their injured companions to rest. Sandy suspects they’re talking about them — about her, about him, about what to do with them both when this is over — and don’t want her to hear what they have to say. Possibly Monkey also wants to talk the little monk through the truth of what happened after they parted ways. How bad it really was, how close Pigsy really was to dying, whether he really is as well healed as everyone keeps saying he is.

In private, of course.

Like they think Sandy couldn’t handle the truth if it was bad.

Or if it was good.

Like anything, good or bad, wouldn’t be so much more bearable than _this_.

The silence, the stillness.

And her thoughts, like the rats in the sewers at night: squeaking and chittering, scurrying and skittering, chewing on the walls inside her head and making them itch. It’s the opposite of silence, the opposite of stillness, now just like then, and no matter what she does they will not stop.

Rats. Vermin, the humans called them, and so they called her too.

Was it any wonder she wouldn’t let even the good ones near her?

Even the Scholar.

Even—

Even when he proved himself worthy. Again and again and again, he proved himself, and again and again she recoiled and reared back and refused to let him touch her.

Kind, compassionate, caring: just like Tripitaka, the Scholar was all those things. He wanted to teach her, he wanted to help her, he wanted to try and make her life better. So many times he offered to bring her food, clean water, clothing, or medicine. Anything she needed, he said, and shook his head with sorrow every time she said no. He offered to bind her wounds, and she hid in the shadows and pretended she had none.

“You know you can’t fool me,” he chided, and Sandy crouched in her corner and told him to leave her alone.

Sometimes he didn’t. Most of the time he did. But even when he did, he would always come back eventually.

She crawled home one day, dripping blood all over the sewer floor.

Sluggish, slow. Headache, limbs heavy. No fear of pursuit, not any more — not this time, not today — but still her heart stopped in her chest when she looked up and saw him standing there, still and stoic, right in the middle of her private space.

 _Uninvited_.

She growled. Would have used her powers if she’d had enough strength, and that would have been the end of his visits and his lessons.

She’s glad now that she didn’t, but then...

No matter. Like always, he paid her no mind, even when she threatened it. He was so unruffled, even by her worst moments. No matter how wild she got, how violent, how angry, even how frightened, he would not be chased off if he’d made up his mind to stay.

He stared at her, blood-soaked and shivering and shell-shocked, and whispered, “What did they do to you?”

Sandy didn’t understand.

Then she did.

And then she laughed.

“Not mine.”

He blinked, dark eyes glittering in the murk. A comfort, Sandy thought, that suddenly he was the one who didn’t understand. She so rarely got to experience things that way round.

“You’re covered in blood,” he pointed out, still staring.

Sandy slunk to her corner, shrugged out of her cloak, and wrung it out into a stagnant puddle. “Not mine,” she repeated. “Theirs.”

He made a strangled, sickened sound. “I’m sorry, what?”

Sandy’s hands twitched. “They won’t trouble me again.”

When she finally looked up, some minutes later, his mouth was hanging open, his face paler than she’d ever seen it. Not like her — no-one but the demons were ever pale like her — but pallid just the same, wan and weak under the dim sewer lights.

“What did you do?” he asked in a ragged, broken whisper.

“Stopped them,” she answered plainly. “Before they could stop me.”

It was not the first time. Certainly, it wouldn’t be the last.

The Scholar stared at her for a long moment, aghast and agog. He seemed unable to process what she was saying, what his eyes and ears were telling him was the truth.

“Did you kill them?”

Sandy turned back to her cloak. All the wringing in the world wouldn’t get the stains out, she thought, and threw it into another corner with a miserable, bone-weary sigh.

“I’m tired,” she said.

And she was. Exhausted because she’d spent the whole day running and hiding and fighting for her life, because she hadn’t eaten in three days and hadn’t slept in four. Exhausted because she had not spilled their blood by choice, any more than she was starving by choice or living by choice in the sewer among the rats and the filth and the waste, any more than it was by choice that the only water she had was sick with poison. Exhausted because he was supposed to be her friend — her only one — and he was looking at her like he was one of them: like she really was the monster they’d made her, like she deserved to be—

She curled up where she was, not bothering to remove her clothes, and she lay there with her face pressed to the cold, damp ground until he gave up and left her alone.

She did not expect him to ever come back after that, but of course he did.

He never looked at her in quite the same way again, but he did come back.

Again and again and again, just as he always had before, he returned with his words and his lessons and his offers of help she did not want and could not trust him to ever really give. He came back, because he was good and kind and filled with things Sandy had never seen in humans before, things she didn’t understand and was afraid to try. He came back, time after time, no matter what she said or did, always with his open arms and his powerful words and his offers of food and water and clothes and medicine.

He came back and he pretended admirably, as the true idealist he was, that nothing had changed.

But after he learned of the things she did to his fellow humans, he never again tried to touch her.

*

Sandy wishes the others would learn that lesson.

Pigsy and Tripitaka. The monks here in this quiet sandalwood-scented monastery, those kind and caring souls who, like the Scholar before them and Tripitaka beside them, only want to ease her pain and balm her wounds, who — following, again, in his footsteps — only want to _help_.

She wishes they would all stop.

She looks across the small, silent infirmary, takes in the empty pallets, lined up neatly side by side. Catches sight of Pigsy’s bulk on the other side of the room, still motionless under his blanket. Nearly dead, so they keep telling her, but somehow still holding on.

Watching him, waiting for breath or motion that never comes, Sandy thinks he deserves more than what he got.

A part of her thinks maybe she did too.

She doesn’t know if his crimes should excuse hers, if the pain he inflicted on her somehow justifies the pain she caused him. She doesn’t know—

She only knows that thinking about it makes her head hurt.

Beyond that...

Beyond that, what she knows is this: that she can’t bear to be touched, that she is afraid of feeling a moment’s kindness growing cold, a moment’s compassion turning hard, that she is afraid of losing control, of leaning into Tripitaka’s gentle hands in one moment then losing herself in the next to her survival instincts or her fear reflexes, that she is terrified she will one day break his bones or snap his neck without even realising that it was him.

She knows that is afraid of many things, but none more than herself.

The Scholar told her she should not kill humans. He told her this after she already had. He told her that it was an abomination, that it went against a god’s nature to do harm to mortals for any reason, that if she continued to walk this path she would be lost.

Sandy had assumed she already was.

A demon in face and voice and deed, if not truly in name. A scourge, an abomination, a thief of food and lives and souls. 

A monster, just as they had made her.

Was there anything left of her still to lose, she wondered. What more harm could possibly be done to the ragged wretch of a god that might still be hiding somewhere inside all that blood-drenched demon’s skin?

He spoke of that so often. Of her being lost, of giving her a chance to find herself again.

Of Tripitaka, who was supposed to show her a better way, teach her how to walk a lighter path. Of Tripitaka, who could help her if she would help him.

She doesn’t feel particularly helpful now. Nor does she feel particularly worthy of help.

The infirmary ceiling is high and beautifully painted. Wispy cloud-like blurs of blue and white, edges of glistering gold, shaded figures that could be humans or gods or both. It seems unusually ornate for a monastery, she thinks, but then perhaps the monks here considered it a gesture of compassion, a scene of indelible beauty for the sick and injured to look at while they moaned and writhed on their pallets.

Certainly, it makes for a pleasant distraction. Sandy loses track of the time she spends gazing up at the thing, imagining that it really is the sky, that the figures are her companions, Tripitaka and Monkey, perhaps the Scholar as well. Imagining, in moments of sorrow, that one of them is herself, drifting high above this awful place and the awful pain and her awful body.

Unworthy, she knows.

But still she imagines.

Still she—

“Pretty good brushwork, yeah?”

She jolts.

His voice — Pigsy’s voice, hoarse and weak but _his_ , as unmistakable as his bulk — cuts straight through her. More biting than a northern wind, and colder by far, it turns her insides to ice, makes her outsides shiver.

“You’re awake,” she gets out.

She doesn’t turn, doesn’t check, doesn’t look. She can’t seem to move. But she can hear him fidgeting and shifting, the squeak of his pallet as he moves, and she imagines he must be sitting up to look at her. The thought makes her feel sick, makes her want to hide under the blankets like he did, only they didn’t give her any. Apparently blankets are a blessing only given to those on the brink of death. The living and still suffering, it seems, must make do without.

And she does. She hides her face behind the tangles of her hair, always an effective shroud in moments like this. She hides her hands beneath her body, bracing the curve of her spine so he won’t see how close they are to becoming fists. She hides the tremors in her limbs, the convulsions of her throat, the whimpers that want to break free. She hides, as she often needed to back when they were enemies, right in front of him.

The rustle of movement stops, sound cutting off into another silence. He’s either given up on looking at her, or else he’s found a comfortable position and settled.

Either way, Sandy doesn’t stop hiding. All the tension of the last few days, gone just a moment ago, is back now in full force; she can barely breathe over the tight cramping of her muscles, the clashing inside her head of fear and anger, dread and panic, horror and hope and—

“Yeah,” Pigsy says. “I’m awake.”

Sandy’s breath stalls in her chest.

“Good,” she says.

It sounds hollow, as empty and confused as she feels. She hopes he’ll blame it on the poor acoustics in this place, though she doubts it. For all that he enjoys playing the fool, he’s not one in truth.

Indeed, she can feel the shrewdness in him when he says, “From my perspective, yeah.”

It’s an invitation, and one she accepts almost without thinking. “I’m glad you survived.”

His breathing hitches, but only a little. It’s an awful sound, like scarring turned to the air, sandpaper sliding across something wet, dried blood scraping along the rusted edge of a blade. It sounds like all the pain he’d been hiding, all the pain he tried to protect her from. It sounds terrible, but still somehow better than it was before.

“Are you?” he asks, and his voice sounds little better. “I mean, really?”

Sandy is a terrible liar. Even if she wasn’t, though, she won’t lie now.

“I don’t know.” It’s a hard thing to admit, all the harder because it’s true. The high ceiling makes it echo, a reverberative knell that thrums like condemnation. Of which one of them, she can’t say and she’s not sure she’d want to know. “Sometimes, yes.”

He chuckles, hoarse but recognisable; perhaps he really is recovering after all.

“And other times?”

Sandy doesn’t want to answer, but what choice does she have? She doubts she could fool him by pretending to fall asleep, and she certainly couldn’t get up and walk away as she might have done before her legs were crushed along with his ribs. She is trapped here, just as she was once trapped by him and his human friends, and now just like then there’s nothing she can do but ride out the moment until he gets bored with her.

“Other times,” she says, very slowly, “I think it would have been kinder for both of us if you’d...”

She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t need to.

Pigsy sighs, sounding laboured. “I see.”

Sandy doesn’t know what compels her to keep speaking. A dedication to honesty in its completeness, perhaps; she can no more leave a truth half-spoken than she could have lied in the first place.

“But then...” Her voice breaks; she takes a moment to steady it, hoping against hope that he didn’t notice. “But then, most of the time, I don’t know what I think. That maybe neither option would bring me peace.” She closes her eyes, blocks out the painted sky, and tries to picture the real one. “It’s all rather confusing.”

“I’ll bet.” He doesn’t sound amused. “Pretty straightforward from where I’m standing, though: just happy to still be kicking.” A low hum, like he’s trying to find the electric frequency of his rake. “Suppose I should buy Monkey a bouquet of flowers or a ‘thank you’ card or something, eh?”

“I’m sure he’d love that.”

She has no idea whether that’s really true or not. Monkey does enjoy being idolised and worshipped, and no doubt he’d find it doubly sweet coming from Pigsy, but she knows that this has left him badly rattled. She’s not sure he’s ready to make light of it, even if it gratifies his ego.

“How about you?” Pigsy asks, cutting through her train of thought.

“I don’t particularly like flowers,” Sandy says, misunderstanding on purpose, because denial is much simpler than trying to navigate the murky waters of what he’s really asking. “Or cards.”

“Smartass.” Another burst of movement, and she turns almost in spite of herself to look at him. He’s sitting up halfway, studying her with devastating closeness. “I’m serious. You good?”

Sandy doesn’t answer. She says, instead, “They said they had to bring you back.”

“Huh.” He’s trying too hard to be careless; she can see the cracks behind his pupils, the places where the shadows want to crawl. “Don’t really remember much of it, to be honest. Just you lot yelling at me, a whole mess of pain, then waking up here with the ‘great and powerful Monkey King’ blubbering like a big baby.”

Sandy musters a watery chuckle. “An exaggeration, no doubt.”

“Ask him.” His grin is comforting, and also a little unsettling; her stomach twists, unsure of how to react. “On second thoughts, don’t bother. You know he’d only insist that it didn’t happen.”

“Because it _didn’t_.”

And there he is, swaggering through the door like he owns the place, as if summoned by the sound of his name. Monkey, capturing all the air and energy in the room and redirecting it until it centres on himself.

Feeling somewhat dizzy with relief, Sandy squeaks, “Where’s Tripitaka?”

“Chatting with the monks about monk stuff.” He waves a hand, dismissing the question like the very idea is a personal affront. “It was so boring that you two seemed like the exciting alternative.”

Pigsy snickers, then immediately winces, one hand flying to his ribs.

Feeling herself blanching, Sandy turns away. She rolls over onto her back, fixes her eyes on the ceiling again, the blue-and-white fake sky, the blurred human-or-god figures, the comfort in such complete vagueness, such absolute anonymity.

“Good,” she says, to one of the painted figures. “I’m happy he’s found some solace among his own kind. I imagine it must be a terrible drain on his spirit, keeping such company as ours.”

It is predictable, the way Monkey strides over just to rap his knuckles on her forehead.

It’s predictable too, that the sharp snap of contact, from him, does not make her flinch.

“Speak for yourself,” he chides playfully. “The monk _loves_ my company.”

He bends over her, then, filling her entire field of vision with his broad shoulders and broader grin.

Sandy swats his arm, annoyed. “You’re blocking my view.”

“I’m _improving_ your view.” He sobers swiftly, though, and his grin dissolves before it has a chance to really warm her. “Good to see you’re both still in one piece, at least. You don’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to being left alone together, you know?”

“I can’t stand,” she reminds him, feeling her throat close up. “I have no crutches. The monks took our weapons away.”

“Right, right, the whole ‘peace and reverence for all life, no weapons allowed’ thing.” He rolls his eyes, making his opinion on that particular subject quite clear. “You want me to go steal them back?”

 _I just want to be out of here,_ Sandy thinks, feeling claustrophobic and trapped. _I want to be far away from this place that smells of the Scholar’s robes and keeps trying to help me_.

Aloud, she says, “It’s all right.” If his too-serious expression is anything to judge by, he can see that it’s not, so she hurriedly adds, “My leg won’t mend unless I rest it, anyway.”

“If you’re in the mood to steal something,” Pigsy pipes up, only a little breathless, “how about some lunch?”

Monkey whirls to face him. The anger in his eyes sparks like lightning, like the prongs of Pigsy’s rake, like the thrum of power under Sandy’s fingers when she gripped its haft.

“Are you serious?” he snaps. “You almost died. No, you _did_ die. More than once! And all you have to say for yourself is ‘lunch’?”

Pigsy actually seems to consider the question. Head tilted, expression faintly serious; Sandy takes advantage of his preoccupation to finally get a good look at his face. He looks a little different, she thinks; there are lines under his eyes and at the corners of his mouth that she’s sure weren’t there before the barren lands. She has aged him, exhausted him, driven him to the brink of death more than once. She has done far worse to him, going by his ravaged features, than he ever did to her — with his bare hands, at least — but still she feels it’s not enough.

She stopped his breath; he never stopped hers.

He left that to his men. His ‘friends’.

She drew his blood, broke his bones; he never did that to her.

But they did, more times than she can count.

And what he did to her... that’s a feeling he will never know.

She was hunted. She was a monster.

He made her those things. He took a hungry, harmless god, and carved out of her something awful, something violent and brutal and dangerous. He didn’t need to touch her to do it. He didn’t need to stop her breath to make her wish that someone — anyone — would do that job for him too. He didn’t need to break her bones himself to make sure they were broken, didn’t need to put his own hands on her body to ensure that a mark was made.

He is looking at Monkey, not at her.

Good. Sandy doesn’t want him to see the horrible things she’s thinking.

She doesn’t want anyone to see that.

“It’s not _all_ I have to say for myself,” Pigsy mutters, after an inordinate amount of thought. “But I’ve been out of it for... what, hours? Days? Way too long to go without a decent meal, either way.”

Sandy’s stomach squirms; acid bursts in her mouth, the mnemonic flavour of forced starvation. It roils inside of her, clashing horribly with the strange, surreal sort of comfort that comes from listening to his complaints about food and thinking, _yes, that’s him, he’s himself again_. It means he is well, it means he will heal, but it also brings back brutal visions of the monster who hid in his golden palace with his unending stock of food and drink and company while she starved for days and days and days.

Once again, she finds herself wanting to strangle him.

But a tiny part of her wants to hug him a little bit too.

She knows which one Tripitaka would tell her is right. And she knows, just as well, which one her survival instincts would say is necessary.

They both kept her alive, each in their own way. The instincts that protected her, and the name of the monk who would one day save her.

Her heart tells her to heed the monk; her body tells her to hold fast to her instincts. Thinking about it too hard makes her head throb, a queasy vertigo-inducing pain that catches the rhythm of her injured leg and makes her feel dizzy and anxious.

“You’re an idiot,” Monkey snaps at Pigsy. Sandy focuses, as best she can, on the wrath in his voice, the hard anger that shrouds something much softer. Strange, she thinks, that he’s so angry with Pigsy for scaring him into feeling too much, but not angry with her for being the reason why it happened in the first place. “But if it’ll shut you up, I’ll go see if those monks have anything edible lying around.”

“I’d really appreciate it,” Pigsy says with exaggerated solemnity.

Monkey turns back to Sandy, mouth half-open to ask if she wants anything, but stops short at the sight of her.

“You know,” he says instead, suddenly quiet, “maybe you should think about taking some of those herbs.”

Sandy glances at the table beside her pallet, the dried painkiller leaves sitting untouched in their neat little pile. She must look really dreadful for him to suggest such a thing, knowing her stubbornness as well as he does.

“Maybe,” she says, just as quietly.

He doesn’t push harder than that. He knows better, just as he always does: the point is made, it’s up to her what she does with it, and he has better things to do than try to coddle her.

Perhaps that’s another reason why she doesn’t flinch when he touches her.

He does it again now, touches her without prompting, without invitation, and somehow without evoking a reaction. 

He leans in like her personal space belongs to him too, fingertips ghosting across her forehead as he brushes the hair out of her eyes; the contact there lasts barely a second, and then he’s shifting lower, shoving her shoulders back until they lose a little of their tension, rearranging her limbs, repositioning her body like a child’s toy, until she’s more comfortable.

She didn’t even realise she wasn’t.

But apparently he did, and he fixed her so easily, without so much a thought.

Tripitaka has wanted to touch her like this since the very beginning: touch her without making her flinch, without making her rear back or recoil, growl or hiss or whimper. Sandy can’t imagine ever responding to his touch — or perhaps simply _not_ responding — the way she does to Monkey’s.

She can’t imagine doing any of this with Tripitaka. Rolling her eyes, the way she does at Monkey, elbowing him in the ribs, muttering at him to stop being silly. She can’t imagine being so playful, so comfortable, so much at ease with Tripitaka, or with anyone else who isn’t Monkey.

She thinks she’s starting to understand why.

She thinks—

“Rest up,” he tells her, with a sharp elbow to the ribs. A comfort to her, and perhaps to him as well, that hers are fully intact. “Going to need you back on your feet soon, so you can help me carry that idiot the next time he lands himself in trouble.”

Sandy swallows hard.

The comfortable, easy feeling vanishes in a heartbeat. She feels unsafe, she feels—

She feels _dangerous_.

“He didn’t get himself in trouble,” she hears herself say, all traces of playfulness long gone. “I did it to him.”

Pigsy coughs awkwardly. “Well. Not quite so simple as all that, eh?”

Generous of him to try and deflect, but they both know there’s no truth in it. “I think it was very simple.”

He studies her for a beat, then sighs and slumps back on his pallet.

“Plenty of blame to go around, if you want it,” he points out. “My plan, your powers, the demons and their prison and their drugs. Take your bloody pick, yeah?”

Monkey, being less prone to over-thinking things than either one of them, ponders this for approximately half a second, then shrugs. “I’ll blame the demons, then.”

Sandy wishes she could do that. Simply cast aside every other player in the wreck of her life, Pigsy and his humans — his friends, who treated him with no less derision than they showed her — and blame Locke or the demon sentinels for all the horrors she saw and endured and inflicted. Locke wanted power and the demons wanted gods; everyone else was collateral damage, caught in the middle.

Even him.

Isn’t that what the Scholar kept trying to make her see?

Isn’t that the lesson she always, always failed to learn?

Still focused on Monkey and his simple deflection of blame, Pigsy grunts his approval.

“Good,” he says. “You done sulking about it, then?”

Monkey tries to glare, but one look at the lines on Pigsy’s face softens him into submission. A strange thing to see on him, to be sure, and all the proof Sandy needs that he really was worried, that despite his best efforts he really does care about the big lug he swears he does not trust.

He is very, very far ahead of her on that.

“Fine,” he’s grumbling. “But don’t let it happen again.” He turns, splitting the force of his glare between them both. “That goes for both of you. You understand me?”

Pigsy snorts, shaking his head. The motion doesn’t make him grimace quite as much as last time, but still Sandy can tell it’s not as painless as he would like.

“You got it, boss,” he quips to Monkey, trying with only moderate success to cover up the discomfort with bravado. “Now be a good Monkey King and get me my lunch.”

Monkey rolls his eyes, but for once does as he told. A last long look at the fading bruises on Pigsy’s chest, a glance over his shoulder at Sandy — her face this time, not her leg — and then he’s gone, spinning on his heels and stalking off without another word.

Then, again, it’s just the two of them.

Sandy lets her head drop back onto her flat, useless pillow, and gazes back up at the ceiling. Another attempt to drown herself in the painted scenes, the wisps of cloud and the too-perfect blue of an imaginary sky, a world far away and so much nicer than the one she knows. She squints at the bodies as well, tries to make out their paint-blurry faces, tries to fathom their expressions and their feelings, tries to understand them. She wonders if the central figure, with its dark flowing locks and its halo of gold, is supposed to be Monkey.

She wonders if she’ll ever find the courage to ask.

From the other side of the room, clearly unsettled by the return to the silence and its accompanying tension, Pigsy clears his throat.

“So...” he says, rather awkwardly. “What were we talking about, again?”

Sandy’s vision blurs. The figure on the ceiling distorts, his golden halo bleeding into his skin, his hair, his clothes. He seems for a moment to be wreathed in flame, or perhaps ignited by a bolt of divine lightning.

“Don’t remember,” she says.

She turns her head to the side, suddenly unable to bear the bleeding, blurring colours, the blue-white sky seeming to turn to storm-grey, the glowing figures fading and bending and vanishing.

Beside her pallet, she sees Tripitaka’s leaves, hears their wordless, colourless offer: pain relief and fathomless sleep.

Oblivion, for a while. Worth it, perhaps, if it brings freedom from Pigsy’s voice, from his need to fill the silence with words, with conversation, with things she doesn’t want to think about and certainly doesn’t want to talk about. Freedom, too, from the sound of his breathing, better now but still shaky, still occasionally rasping and razed and rattling, still carrying all the evidence of his pain.

She doesn’t want to sleep. She definitely doesn’t want to dream.

But she is so tired, and the pounding of her head is almost worse than the throbbing of her legs, and—

And Pigsy is still _talking_.

Babbling, blathering, burbling on and on and on. Frenetic, sort of feverish; she recognises his desperation as somewhat like she was in the desert, how urgently she tried to keep them moving, to ration their supplies, their strength, their everything. He speaks like it’s his only tether to the world around him, like he is as terrified of the silence as she is of noise, as terrified by the notion of peace and quiet as she is by the thought of being touched and talked to and taken care of.

Sandy thinks of the monks, recalling their offers to heal her, to help her. She thinks of Tripitaka, of his open smile and his open arms.

She crushes the leaves in a fist she doesn’t remember making.

She says to Pigsy, still unwilling to look at him, “I’m very tired.”

“Oh.” His throat clicks, a noisy, nervous swallow that Sandy knows far too well; her own clenches in sympathetic panic. “I mean, sure. Of course.” She can feel his eyes on her, and on the leaves in her fist, and it takes every ounce of restraint she has not to turn and look at him. “G’night, then, I guess?”

Sandy doesn’t reply. Her mouth and her head are both too full.

Eyes closed, chewing slowly, she breathes and waits for silence.

*


	14. Chapter 14

*

Time passes very slowly in an infirmary bed.

Doubly slow for someone like Sandy, who is as unaccustomed to stillness as she is to safety.

She hates being stuck in one place. Helpless, vulnerable, trapped and bound, unable to stand or defend herself.

Never mind that the monastery is supposed to be a sacred space, never mind that it is a place of healing and protection, never mind that she is supposed to be—

Never mind any of that. She is _still_ , and she hates it.

She hates that there is nothing in this place to distract her, no desperation or dehydration, no need for survival or fear; the only thing at the front of her mind is the pain. It is relentless, unending, and eventually it gets bad enough that she has no other recourse but to give in and accept their help.

She really, _really_ hates that.

She hates the monks’ hands on her. She hates that Tripitaka’s are among them.

She hates that their handling of her wounds eventually makes them feel better.

She hates that it’s still not enough.

Pigsy is back on his feet within a day. Unsurprising, he was almost more unsettled by this place than Sandy is; restless and uneasy, he seems unable to bear the quiet emptiness of the infirmary. Perhaps her company as well, and almost certainly her refusal to indulge him in idle, mindless conversation. His voice sears and scorches along her nerves, reawakens the dark things that live inside her head and twists her sleep into a nightmare-filled maelstrom of sound and mess and violence.

Her silence, she suspects, has something of a similar effect on him.

In any case, it is rather more difficult for the monks to keep him on his pallet when both of his legs are perfectly functional. He’s a god, and not even a dozen of their order can keep him down once he’s made up his mind to get up and leave the infirmary.

Secretly relieved by his disappearance, Sandy basks in the silence, lets it be a balm for the stillness and inactivity that still threatens to drive her mad.

Silence is a blessing, a gift. Isolation and solitude, the only kind of safety or security she ever knew: if she was entirely alone, if the world around her was perfectly silent, she could not be harmed. No footsteps, no voices, no threats. Only the whispers in the water and the chittering of the rats.

That was her safety.

It still is.

The stillness still bothers her, though. She feels like she’s been knocked down or pinned, like having her back pressed to the wall or a body bearing down on hers, shoving her face into the cold, wet ground; it makes her think of those awful days when her whole self was numb and useless, when her mind was dazed and dizzied, when she couldn’t speak and could barely move. When they would weaken her with their demon’s smoke and their human voices, and then send her out into the sunlight and the streets, and then—

And then.

She _hates_ being still.

She hates—

She hates that it is necessary. She hates that it is working. The stillness, the inactivity, the humans and their help. The monks and their gentle labours, their herbs and their medicines and her natural talent for healing, the stillness in her legs finally enabling them to mend, to repair, to grow stronger again.

She hates that she needs it.

She feels weak and stupid.

A part of her, the dark and disturbed part, the part that makes even Tripitaka hold his distance sometimes, keeps whispering in her head that she deserves far worse. This was all her own doing, after all; it is the product of her anger, her violence, her loss of control. Perhaps her fear, too, if she’ll ever admit to that as a driving force in her life.

It is. She knows it is.

But that is the hardest pill to swallow: that she lashes out not because she is angry but because she is scared.

Whatever the source, the end result remains the same, and it rests squarely on her shoulders. Pigsy’s suffering, his almost-deaths, the haunted look on Monkey’s face as he told them that the monks had needed to bring him back. That she had brought him back too, not from the grave but from the doorstep of demons, that she is the reason they had to bring him back from anywhere.

That finally, after all those long years, she killed him.

That she still doesn’t know how she feels about that.

“He lost his life,” she says to Tripitaka, late into the second day. He’s seated at her bedside, pretending that he’s there to check her outer wounds and not measure the state of her inner ones. Sandy is not fooled, of course, but she lacks the strength to call him on the lie. “If Monkey and your fellow monks speak true, he lost his life more than once.”

Tripitaka makes a strained, haunted noise. “So they tell me, yes.”

It sounds worse coming from him. Sandy has to swallow and sit up before she can continue.

“So he lost his life,” she presses. “But I won’t lose my leg. I won’t even lose sensation in it, not even the smallest little bit. I lose nothing at all, and he lost his life. It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t...” Another swallow, and then another; her mouth is by turns dry as the barren lands and flooded with saliva. “I did this. I’m the one who should be punished.”

“It’s not that simple,” Tripitaka tells her, not for the first time. “And besides, Pigsy’s fine now. Whatever he went through, he—”

“Survived,” Sandy finishes, feeling hollow.

“Yeah.” His expression flickers. For once, Sandy can’t read the heart underneath; she has no idea what he’s feeling. “I think... when you’re back on your feet, that is... I think you should talk to him.”

Sandy doesn’t want to do that. In truth, it’s the last thing in the world she wants to do.

But she knows he’s right: if the quest is to continue with all four of them, it has to happen eventually. They can’t keep going like this, her instincts seething and boiling every time she looks at him and him pretending he doesn’t see or hear, pretending he doesn’t know anything about it. The awkwardness, the non-apologies, the feigned indifference on his part, the anger and fear and violence on hers, the blood pounding in her ears when he smiles or shrugs like it meant nothing, all those years. He can forget so much on his path to redemption, but Sandy’s head and body are filled with things that she will remember forever.

They need to talk about it. He needs to see, needs to know, needs to understand. He needs to _learn_ —

And perhaps she does too.

And it is that, far more than the idea of laying bare her razed, ravaged parts, that makes her shiver.

“I can’t,” she whispers.

Tripitaka pats her leg, close to where the worst of the pain was. Now, after only a couple of days of rest and poultices, Sandy scarcely feels anything.

Except the usual: vision blurring, pulse racing, hands twitching and shaking. Except the usual: biting down on her survival instincts to stop them from taking over because her friend and healer dared to try and touch her.

“You’re doing much better,” Tripitaka muses, oblivious. “You heal so fast.”

“I’m a god,” she reminds him, willing her body not to tense, not to tighten, not to try to pull away or do something worse. “And I have a great deal of experience. This is nothing, compared to what I—”

What _he_ —

She doesn’t finish.

Tripitaka doesn’t ask her to.

He tucks in the edge of the bandage, clean and white, uncomfortably damp with one of his herbal mixtures, and lets his hands linger against the fabric. Delicate, affectionate, and careful this time to avoid making contact with the skin.

“I wish your other wounds would heal so easily,” he says, very quietly.

Sandy pretends she didn’t hear that. Safer for him, less painful for her.

“I won’t hold up the quest much longer,” she promises. “I want to try walking tomorrow. If your well-intentioned friends will let me out of their sight for a moment, that is.”

She means the other monks, of course, the ones who dwell in this place, who prowl the infirmary at all hours of the day and night to make sure she’s staying still, keeping quiet, behaving herself. Genuine concern, of course, but she can tell there’s a touch of fear in them too; her outbursts on their arrival have not been forgotten, and no doubt word has spread that she’s the one who caused all this misery in the first place.

Perhaps that’s why they only ever tend her wounds in groups of three.

Not so for Tripitaka, who would trust her even if he were the one who’d been crushed to within an inch of his life. He tends her as he would tend Monkey, as he would tend Pigsy, as he would tend anyone who needed his compassion or his kindness, without a care for his own safety.

Just one more of the many, many things Sandy hates about being here.

“Are you sure you’re up for it?” he’s asking, chewing his lip and wringing his hands like a fretting parent. “I mean, you were in pretty bad shape...”

“No worse than he was,” Sandy mutters, feeling her temper rise. “He stopped _breathing_ , and he’s already back on his feet.”

Tripitaka sighs. “He’s back on his feet,” he reminds her, trying just a little too hard to be tactful, “because his feet weren’t injured.”

The truth of it is a blow. Sandy swallows the urge to growl, to show her teeth, to—

She closes her eyes, counts to ten, and mutters, “This stillness will be the end of me.”

“I know it’s hard,” Tripitaka says, rather generously.

Sandy rolls over. She can do that easily now, without having to brace her whole body for the inevitable blast of pain; she’d almost forgotten how it feels, to engage her body in a simple act of motion and not suffer endlessly for it.

The blank, empty wall she finds on her side gives her some comfort. It doesn’t try to smile when it’s feeling sad, and it doesn’t try to fill her head with lies. It’s been a pleasant companion during her convalescence.

“You don’t know anything,” she says, because this is the only way she can say these things to Tripitaka: when she’s facing something faceless. “You can’t. You _can’t_ , and I don’t...”

She trails off. She doesn’t know what to say, and she hates herself.

Tripitaka is silent for a long moment. Sandy can hear the rhythmic in-and-out of his breathing, smooth and even and contemplative. It is unexpectedly comforting, listening to him breathe, after the ragged rasp of Pigsy’s broken ribs, the gasps and stutters and groans that she should have taken more seriously. There is no danger in the way Tripitaka opens his lungs, only in the things he says when he opens his mouth.

Which he does, of course, because he can’t seem to help himself.

“I think,” he says, not for the first time, “you should talk about it.”

Sandy’s stomach leaps up into her throat. It’s been a while since it’s done that quite so forcefully, so much so that she has to bolt upright and cover her mouth; the suddenness of the movement sends a cascade of now-rare pain through her leg, little nerve-deep spasms that shoot up and down her body. The two combined, nausea and resurging pain, set her even more on edge than she was to begin with.

“With you?” she manages. “You want me to... to...”

She doesn’t finish; she’s too busy swallowing, too busy trying to crack her fists open, too busy trying to get her wayward body back under control.

Tripitaka doesn’t ask if she’s all right. He pretends not to see the way she’s turned deathly pale, or the way she’s shaking again, or the way she—

Or any of the thousand little-but-big things she’s doing right now.

“Not with me,” he says, then swiftly backtracks. “I mean... of course, with me, if you want to. I’m always... that is, um, you know I was raised by the Scholar. I can listen, if you...”

“I don’t,” Sandy rasps. Just the thought of it makes her whole body seize up. “I don’t want you to have to hear it.”

“I know.” His smile is sweet; it hides the sorrow better than usual. “I know you don’t believe it, Sandy, but there are some things I do understand. Not everything, not by a long way, but enough for this.” He lets that sit for only a moment — no doubt he can tell she’ll try to argue if he leaves it any longer — then presses on, very slowly, “But I meant that you should talk about it with him.”

This for the second time in as many minutes. The sourness in Sandy’s stomach grows worse.

“No,” she says, even more upset than before.

“He can’t understand if you don’t explain it.”

“If he doesn’t understand by now,” Sandy says, swallowing down the sharp, unwelcome taste of sickness, “he never will.”

Tripitaka sighs. His frustration is a palpable thing, turning the air thick and heavy, but he doesn’t let it consume him. For once, he proves himself a master of restraint; he doesn’t even let it touch his face. Sandy cannot fathom having so much control, cannot fathom feeling something strongly and then simply tucking it away as if it were meaningless; no violence, no reflexes or instincts, not even having to try to keep it hidden. Only that: a moment’s frustration, smothered and then cast aside as if it never existed at all.

He really is the most remarkable human she has ever known.

“Even if that’s true,” he says, clearly choosing his words very carefully. “Even if he’ll never understand, don’t you think he needs to hear it anyway? The consequences of his actions, what it meant for his...”

He trails off, seemingly unable to say ‘victim’.

Sandy grips the edges of her pallet, fingers digging urgently into the thin mattress, trying without success to keep herself grounded, keep herself present, keep herself in one piece.

“Why from me?” she asks in a tiny, tremulous voice. “Let him hear it from someone else. Let someone else try to make him understand. Let someone else hurt for him.” She doesn’t care that she sounds small, doesn’t care that she must surely look exactly as vulnerable as she feels; she is exposed, she is helpless, and she does not care at all. “I’m tired, Tripitaka. I’m tired of talking to him and I’m tired of hurting for him, and I’m tired of...” She shakes her head. “I’m _tired_.”

The truth of it resonates, catching the cool air and turning it fever-hot. Tripitaka winces and pulls away, gliding back up to his feet seemingly with no effort at all.

Even now, almost entirely healed, Sandy can’t imagine moving so fluidly without pain.

“All right,” he says, in a tone she knows well. “I’ll leave you, then. To get some rest.”

Sandy winces. “I didn’t mean to...”

“I know.” It sounds different, she thinks, every time he says it. She wonders how he manages that, if it’s a human thing or simply normal for those more accustomed to social interaction. “But you’re right. I shouldn’t keep pushing you to talk if you’re not ready. It’s like your leg, I guess. Some parts of you heal faster than others.”

Some parts, Sandy thinks, probably won’t heal at all. But she couldn’t bear to see the look on his face if she told him that, and so she just says, “I suppose.”

“Yeah.” He steeples his fingers, like he’s trying to keep his hands busy so he won’t be tempted to touch her. “And I’m not very good with the kind of wounds I can’t mix up a poultice for.”

He means: _it’s not you, it’s me._

He means that he doesn’t like feeling helpless any more than she does. That he doesn’t like it when he can’t fix things, or guide people to the right way of fixing themselves. That it frustrates him when someone cannot simply be saved by good intentions and the right combination of herbs.

He is so much like the Scholar.

Sandy wonders what he would say if she told him that. Would he be proud? Upset? Would it bring back all the happy memories he will never experience again, or just remind him of all the sad ones, the losses and the disappointments and the heartbreaks?

She doesn’t want to risk the latter, and so she keeps it to herself.

She draws in a breath instead, and lies. “I appreciate you trying.”

“No, you don’t.” Still, it makes him smile that she made the effort, and that makes the bitter-tasting falsehood worthwhile. “I’ll leave you to rest. If you’re really determined to get up tomorrow, you should take it easy.”

Sandy returns his smile, then, with slightly less than the usual strain. It is much easier to endure the unending stillness with a purpose ahead. Tripitaka knows this, perhaps from his own experience; that’s why he’s saying it.

“I will,” she says. Then, with so much emotion it makes her body twitch with the need to hide, “Thank you.”

*

She does take it easy, only somewhat grudgingly, and she does get up the next day.

The monks fuss and tut, of course, but Sandy draws some comfort in knowing that they can’t stop her. She’s stronger now, well rested and mostly well-fed; the pain is less, the torn-up flesh of her leg is knitted back together as tough and powerful as it ever was before. She may not be able to depend on her high kicks for a while, but she is functionally herself again: a god, powerful and unstoppable and growing more so with every hour. 

She will not be imprisoned by humans again.

Even well-meaning ones. Even ones who call themselves healers.

Even in a prison that calls itself an infirmary.

She makes the attempt on one of the rare moments they leave her completely alone. Safety in solitude, no fear of being seen, no fear of her weaknesses being known if she fails, no fear of attention or voices or distractions.

No fear of being afraid.

Only her, alone under the painted-sky ceiling, and she has become so intimately acquainted with that over the last few days that it feels almost like the old familiar walls of her sewer, dripping water and filth, keeping her protected from those who would hunt her down.

Alone and unwatched, she stands.

On both legs, the bad and the not-so-bad, she stands. She stands, holding her whole body’s weight balanced and poised like a soldier’s, and she does not fall. The tug of pain on her left leg is undeniable but fleeting; it flares briefly, brightly, but by the time she’s locked her knees and drawn a breath it’s already starting to fade.

And then she is standing. Without weapons, without crutches, without help of any kind. Mostly without pain as well, and the relief of that is so profound she almost blacks out.

She walks. Slowly, carefully, with greater patience than she’s ever shown herself before. Patient by necessity, slow by choice; she will not land herself back on that pallet.

She circles the little infirmary, keeping close to the walls just in case the pain comes back to cripple her, just in case she needs some solid surface to support her or catch her or keep her upright, just in case she is not as strong as she imagines she is. Just in case she loses her power, loses her balance, loses her—

She doesn’t lose anything.

Twice, she walks the circumference of the room, feeling only a faint tug of soreness here and there, a gentle warning from her body when she gets close to over-exerting herself or pushing her still-mending legs too far.

The gentleness is a surprise: her body’s warnings aren’t usually that way.

Perhaps it is starting to feel the influence of this place, so full of warmth.

They get to know each other again, her body and her mind, slowly and carefully and patiently. She readjusts to being whole — mostly whole, nearly whole, whole but still riddled with holes — and she walks and walks until she is worn out, until the immobility of the last few days catches up and leaves her thoroughly drained.

This feeling she knows very well.

The all-devouring weakness that always follows a serious illness or injury, the stagnation of a body so used to running and hiding after days of unexpected and unwanted stillness. A god heals from wounds like this very swiftly — days, where it would take a human months or a demon a week — but the strength wanes swiftly as well, sapped by the quickened healing process and drained hour by hour with the awful, unending inactivity.

So the morning goes: she walks, she stops, she rests, she walks.

It is frustrating, but experience has taught her there is no other way unless she wishes to relapse.

Over and over, until she knows her limits, until she trusts them.

As much as she ever trusts anything.

Then, at long last, when she is sure her body is strong enough to keep her up, she ventures outside.

It is a strange, foreign sensation, to walk with absolute freedom. Without both hands occupied, without having to keep one or both legs off the ground, without a weapon-crutch planted in the ground beside her. Leaning her weight on her own limbs instead of borrowed ones, dependent on nothing but her own body, her own strength, her own self.

It’s invigorating, and it’s terrifying.

She does not let that last part show.

The monastery gardens are modest but abundantly stocked with herbs, flowers, and vegetables of all kinds. Sandy recognises almost nothing, but she can easily imagine Tripitaka whiling away his days out here, worshipping the earth and all its bounties. She wonders if the Scholar’s monastery had a similar garden, if that’s how they both know their herbs and plants so well.

Perhaps one day, when they’re both in a little bit less pain — she in her head, Tripitaka in his aching, grief-stricken heart — she’ll ask him about it. Perhaps he will find healing in talking about something so simple and precious. Perhaps she too will find healing, of a sort, to hear about it.

She had hoped to find herself alone out here. Peace and quiet, a place to breathe in fresh air and reacclimatise to having the full use of her body.

A way to adjust, too, to being back out under the open sky instead of the infirmary’s painted one. It is a new lesson every day, she’s discovered, living in the world instead of underneath it, standing next to humans and gods and people instead of hiding from them. She is still learning to smother her memories, to keep her pulse slow and steady, to refrain from hiding or turning herself to mist every time she’s seen or heard or noticed.

Like now.

One of the monks stands nearby, tending a flowerbed. A youngish novice, and one that, on closer inspection, Sandy thinks she recognises from the infirmary: he bound her legs a couple of times, clumsy and numb-fingered and thoroughly dreadful at the job. She remembers his superiors snapping at him for his awkwardness, frustrated by his inability to follow instructions.

She remembers, too, rather less generously, that his efforts caused more pain than they mended. It took a great force of will, she recalls to keep herself from striking out at him so that he would stop trying and leave her alone.

She doesn’t feel quite so raw now, but the sight of him still makes her stiffen and tense.

She wonders if that’s a product of the unpleasant memory or simply of being in close proximity to another living soul. Is this simply something she’ll have to endure for the rest of her life, she wonders, the violent, vivid reaction to the sight of other people, the cold sweat and full-body tremors, the urge to make herself disappear.

She swallows those urges now, as she has done a thousand times since reaching this place, and when the young man lifts his head from his labours and waves to greet her, she doesn’t flinch.

Well.

She doesn’t flinch as much as she normally would.

It is something, at least.

“You’re up,” he says, beaming.

Sandy looks down at her leg. It’s still bound in the crisp clean bandages that smell of this place, but there’s not a trace of unsteadiness in her gait or her posture. She should be proud, she knows, but now that she’s no longer alone out here the only thing she has room to feel is nervousness and social anxiety.

“So it would seem,” she mumbles, keeping her eyes downcast.

Unbothered by her inability to make eye-contact, the monk presses, “How does it feel to be back on your feet?”

“Better than being on my back.” She swallows, trying to stay calm. “I’m sorry. Am I disturbing you?”

“Of course not.” An unexpected rustle of movement makes her look up again; she finds him straightening, wiping his earth-splotched hands on his robes. Sandy prays he’s not readying to offer them in a handshake. “This monastery is a place of refuge. Nowhere is forbidden to you.”

That’s more comforting than Sandy expects. Sunlight may still be a strange and not entirely pleasant sensation to one who’s lived almost her entire life underground, but after nearly three days of bed-rest she finds that she’s almost missed having the cool, natural earth beneath her feet.

Still, looking around and finding the place otherwise empty, Sandy feels obligated to ask, “Do you know where my companions are?”

He looks thoughtful for a moment, then shrugs. “I’m sure they’re keeping themselves occupied,” he says. “Your young monk seems to enjoy spending time in the archives, poring over our old texts and scrolls. A rare thing indeed, to find such passion for learning in one so young.” His eyes grow soft and warm; Sandy wonders briefly if he is older than he appears. “A regular little scholar.”

There is no weight to the word — it is meant as a descriptor, not a title — but still it makes Sandy’s heart seize.

“Yes,” she hears herself rasp. “He certainly is.”

“As to The Monkey King...” He clears his throat, no doubt trying to be tactful. An impossible feat, Sandy has discovered, when Monkey is involved. “Ah, he grows restless so easily. Who can say where he’d be in any given moment?”

In spite of herself, Sandy finds a smile. “I hope he’s not causing too much trouble.”

“Not at all. Restlessness is not uncommon amongst those brought here by necessity rather than by faith. We... well, suffice it to say we’re well acquainted with his type.” His smile is sun-warm and full of kindness. Sandy knows it should set her at ease, but it doesn’t; it just makes her own smile evaporate. “I have no doubt our revered leaders will have found a way to put his unique talents to use.”

Sandy turns her face upwards, lets the sun hit her face. “Good.”

The monk hums his agreement. “And as to your other friend...”

“He’s not my friend!”

She blurts it out — no, _shouts_ it — without thought or control, and immediately claps both hands over her mouth.

A thousand feelings all roll through her at once, clattering and clamouring like a heavy-laden cart running roughshod over her bones. Pain, anger, the too-familiar flash of fear that seizes her chest when she remembers things she doesn’t want to, and a sense of shame — no, stronger: humiliation — so profound it almost makes her want to turn around and flee straight back to her pallet, to hide from this well-meaning little human and his suddenly shaky smile.

He’s already backpedalling, stammering his own shame; it tastes worse than hers, for being so badly misplaced.

“My apologies,” he squeaks. “Your monk did say that the situation was fraught. I should not have presumed...”

“No.” Sandy closes her eyes, blocks out his face and the sunlight both. Breathes slowly and focuses her whole body on the cool earth beneath her boots, the grounding ground, the impossibility of standing on it without crutches. “I mean, yes. It is fraught. But that’s not your fault. And I... that is, I understand why you’d think we were friends. We are on the same quest, after all. We journey together, fight together, support each other. In the barren lands, I kept him alive.”

_And then I killed him._

Without warning, her legs give out beneath her.

She goes down hard, vision blurring with—

Not with pain. She barely feels her body at all.

Tears, hot and horrible, scalding her face.

She’s not crying. She’s not, she can’t, she won’t—

Not in front of this stranger. Not here, under the real sky, the warm sun lighting up her face, making it glow, showing off all her cracks and broken pieces to this young-looking monk who isn’t Tripitaka, who isn’t the Scholar, who is no-one at all and whose robes mean nothing. She will not cry in front of him, this nobody in the middle of nowhere who can’t even bind her legs, who can’t even prune a garden, who can’t even—

It’s not safe.

It’s not safe to cry in front of anyone. Emotional weakness is still weakness, and she has weakened herself enough already, splayed out helplessly in the earth and grass, unable to get back up, unable to resist or fight back, unable to move, unable to—

 _No_.

She squints up into the blinding sky, finds the young monk’s face framed in a halo of golden light.

For a moment she feels touched by something as dazzling and distant as the sun.

And then, less than a second later, she feels terrified.

The monk, looking nearly as frightened as Sandy feels, gives an awkward cough.

“Should I fetch your...” He splutters, swiftly correcting himself. “That is, should I see if I can find your young monk? The Monkey King, perhaps? Or, ah... if you’d permit me to help you back to the infirmary?”

Sandy shakes her head. Breathes shallowly, lets the rise and fall of her chest bring her slowly back, quieting her thoughts, her panic, the not-pain still gripping her body and pinning her to the damp ground.

“It’s not my leg,” she tells him, when she is able to speak. “Only a moment of clumsiness, nothing more.”

“Oh.” His features relax with genuine, honest relief. “Well, you know I have some familiarity with those.”

Even healed as it is, Sandy’s leg twinges, recalling the truth of that statement all too well.

“You’re not a particularly talented healer,” she agrees, blunt enough that she knows Tripitaka would chide her if he were here. Then, to soften the blow as she knows he would want, “Rather like I’m not a particularly talented god.”

It is a lie, and a truth as well.

In some ways, Sandy is an incredibly talented god. Had to be, really, to have survived as long as she has with nothing but her elemental gifts and her combat prowess to keep her alive. No training, no education, a stunted adolescence delayed by privation; all she had was the whispers of the water and her own willingness to hear it. 

She takes great pride in that, in her talent for sensing and manipulating the flow of water in all its forms, the ripples and the bubbles, the pressure and its power, its wildness as unstoppable as her own.

She takes great pride, too, in her skill with the scythe, the way her limbs and her body become water themselves in those moments when her powers can’t help her. When it’s only her fists or her feet, her blade and their bodies, when there is no water nearby or she is too drugged or concussed to find it, she has survived again and again on quickness and fortitude alone.

This is why it isn’t true, and also why it is.

Too much power, too much raw strength, and so little control.

She has done things that no god ever should.

She as done them without thought, without hesitation, and without remorse.

She has—

“Um.” Dragging her back to the present, the monk clears his throat again. Delicately now, the panic seems to have dissipated. “Are you sure I shouldn’t help you back to the infirmary? You’re welcome to stay, of course, only you seem a little...”

He trails off, no doubt thinking himself tactful in leaving the details unvoiced.

Sandy ignores the question, and the unspoken commentary on her condition. She looks into his open, eager face, his skin a little darker than Tripitaka’s, his eyes a little lighter, the lines more slender and fractionally more masculine; the difference between them isn’t substantial, but it makes it easier to speak with this young monk than with her own. His features means nothing to her; she barely even recalls his name. When she leaves this place and returns with her companions to the quest, it’s not likely she’ll ever see his face again.

Anonymity is a great equaliser, and a great comfort.

“Tell me,” she says, “is there anything more sacred to a monk than life?”

If the sudden change of topic surprises him, he doesn’t let it show at all.

“A budding theologian?” he muses, lightly teasing.

“A serious question,” Sandy replies soberly. “The Scholar believed it’s the greatest abomination a god can commit, to take a human life. No matter his other deeds, no matter how terrible or cruel or awful, his spirit will remain pure if he can keep his hands clean of human blood.”

As Pigsy could.

As she could not.

She tells herself that it was a luxury he had and she was denied: to choose not to kill. Pigsy never needed to fight for his life, he was never trapped or cornered or hunted like an animal, he was never surrounded on all sides by their boots and their blades and their bodies—

He never had to kill to stay alive.

She did.

She had no choice.

She had no—

So she told herself.

So she _tells_ herself.

But she knows now, and perhaps she knew then too, that it’s not really true.

Sandy is powerful; this she knows about herself. She is strong, and she is tough, not just in the silly ways that Monkey teases her about but in the real, true, survival ways. She brought a god-forged prison down on her own head, tore her legs to pieces and pierced Pigsy’s lungs, all while suffocating and drugged beyond coherence. And here she is, just a few short days, later walking around as if none of those things ever happened.

She would survive, she knows, anything they did to her. No matter how brutal, no matter how terrible, no matter what. She could endure it, and she could survive.

To kill them instead was a choice.

Instinct, perhaps, reflexes too sharply honed to suppress in moments of panic, but even so: a choice, and one she made more times than she could count. Sometimes drugged, like in the barren lands, sometimes scared, sometimes wounded, sometimes simply trapped and lashing out because it was the only thing she could think of to do. Again and again and again, she found a reason, and again and again and again she survived where they did not.

It was not the only path.

Perhaps it was the only one she could see at the time. But wasn’t that her failing too?

Shouldn’t she have tried harder? Shouldn’t she have bitten her sleeve and taken it?

She could have.

She is strong. She is powerful.

She heals quickly.

She would have healed quickly.

The monk, watching her with sorrow in his eyes, says, “It is a terrible thing to take a human life.”

“I know,” Sandy says numbly.

“For a god more than most,” he goes on, as though delivering a sermon. “Your kind are infinitely more powerful than ours. We’re little more insects to you, entirely at your mercy.”

Sandy thinks of Pigsy’s human guards, Locke’s army, his ‘friends’ always at his side, always ready to do what he lacked the stomach to do for himself. She thinks of the things they threatened to do — offered, right in front of his face — and the worse things they did the moment his back was turned.

“Humans can be terrible creatures,” she says. “Far worse than demons.”

“Indeed they can.” The slump of his shoulders says he speaks from experience; Sandy wonders what other lost and wounded souls have shared her pallet over the years. “Those of us who choose this path know this very well.”

Sandy acknowledges this with an imperceptible nod. “But still their lives — _human_ lives — are precious. More so than ours?”

“More fragile, certainly.” He ponders for a beat, then sighs, the weary sigh of a scholar who has no easy answers to a very difficult question. “But more precious? Who can say? I don’t believe one life is worth more or less than another, no matter his deeds.”

Sandy thinks she understands. She thinks perhaps she doesn’t want to.

She thinks she shouldn’t have asked if she didn’t want to hear the answer, but it’s too late now to ask him to take it back.

“Do you know where he is?” she asks.

“Your...” He clears his throat. “Your companion?”

The word is no less bitter than ‘friend’, stammered and stuttered as it is, but Sandy forces herself to nod and pretend it’s more palatable. She thinks perhaps there is no word that really fits. They were enemies, now they’re part of the same team; the sight of him fills her with rage and with fear, and she suspects the same is true in reverse. She spent years wishing she could end his life, then she did it in a moment of weakness without meaning to. She dreamed of his death countless times over the years, then dragged herself nearly to the brink of her own to try and keep him alive.

She doesn’t know what they are. But for now...

“My ‘companion’,” she affirms. “Do you know if he’s fully recovered?”

“As far as I know, yes.” A thoughtful hum, then he finally answers her original question. “He’s been spending a lot of time in the monastery. Tending the altars, joining my brothers and sisters in their prayers and devotions.” He pauses, looking deeply contemplative. “I think this experience has left him... harrowed. He seems to take succour in exploring his spirituality.”

Sandy bites down on a cold laugh. “He is not a spiritual person.”

“Perhaps he wasn’t. But he certainly wears the face of one now.”

Interesting.

Highly unlikely, but interesting nonetheless.

Sandy nods.

“Well, then,” she says after a beat, “I suppose I’d better go and see this spiritual awakening for myself.” She hesitates, then adds, because she knows Tripitaka would encourage politeness no matter her personal feelings, “Thank you for your help.”

The monk, already turning back to his labour, seems not to hear her.

*

Unlikely as it is, she does find him in the monastery, stooped over an altar in silent contemplation.

If it were Tripitaka, Sandy would turn around and leave him to it. She may have failed to learn many of the Scholar’s lessons, but this one stuck deep inside her: to never interrupt a soul bowed in prayer, to never step between a human — or a god, or, yes, even a demon — in a moment of private devotion or spirituality.

If it were Tripitaka, she would step back and disappear as silently as her still-mending body would allow. If it were one of the monks who make this monastery their home, she would perhaps mumble an apology and then do the same. If it were anyone else at all, she would be gone before her footsteps had a chance to echo.

But him?

She can scarcely believe she’s seeing it at all, much less believe that what she sees is the truth.

Surely he’s just sniffing around for offerings.

Surely he’s just dusting off some dirt or debris he happened to notice while engaged in some other mindless, menial task.

Surely he—

A cough bursts out of her, shattering the silence. A reaction to the dry air, so she tells herself, but it has a more immediate effect as well: Pigsy whirls around, face flashing heat, as though caught in some illicit act.

The blush fades only the slightest bit when he sees it’s her.

“Hey,” he says, mustering a weak grin. “You’re back on your feet.”

Sandy swallows, then coughs again. “So it would seem.”

“How’re you feeling?”

She doesn’t answer; the look on his face says he didn’t expect her to. Instead she takes a moment to look him over, to ask the same question in return without having to actually say the words.

It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since he left the infirmary. Some soft, weak little part of her wants to make sure he’s really all right, and the rest wants to see if her mark is still there, to scour him for a flicker of discomfort, of pain or distress, any sign at all — beyond his location — that he has been changed by what happened to him.

By what she did to him.

She finds none. No hint of what he has endured, save perhaps a slight dimming of his smile and the way it doesn’t seem to reach beyond the corners of his mouth. A few clouds behind his eyes, a little dimness there as well; she thinks perhaps he looks a little older too, that he’s still wearing some of the extra lines she saw in him back in the infirmary.

Other than that, nothing.

“They told me you’d taken to worship and prayer,” she muses. “I couldn’t quite believe it.”

He shrugs. Like his smile, it tries a little too hard to be casual.

“Well, you know.” There is an uncharacteristic softness to his voice, like he’s trying not to disturb whatever spirits make their home here. “We’ve been stuck here for a few days. Figured I’d go native, see how I liked it.”

Sandy doesn’t believe that for a second, but she humours him with a wry smile. “And how do you like it?”

“Better than you might think.”

He sounds sincere, he looks sincere, all of her senses tell her that he really is sincere, yet she still can’t bring herself to believe—

“Good.”

The word bursts out of her unbidden, like a muscle spasm or a jolt of vertigo. She doesn’t know if she means it or not, but its aftertaste sticks stubbornly to the roof of her mouth and she thinks that maybe she does.

Pigsy makes no reply. He turns back to the altar, as though forgetting she’s there at all, and spends another few moments in quiet contemplation. Sandy watches in silence, respectful and patient in spite of herself, surprised by his willingness to be so seen, to expose so much of his inner self in such a private and personal moment.

It is one thing to share his newfound faith with the holy men and women who live here — they would surely understand such a calling — but to share it with a faithless wretch of a god like Sandy, so empty and tainted, is something else entirely.

Despite herself, she feels a little flattered.

When he turns back again, he is transformed. The lines on his face are smoother, and the clouds seem to have faded from his eyes. He still looks older than he did before, but less drained, perhaps a little less burdened. Like the moment’s meditation really has cleansed his spirit somehow.

Sandy doesn’t understand it, and she doubts she ever will. What little she knows of worship extends only to the realm of the tangible: to the Scholar and his lessons, to the way Tripitaka bows his head over the morning and evening meals, to—

To the little piece of herself, too, that is connected to him. At least, to the way her heart responds to his name in those too-rare moments when she imagines she might be worthy.

This from half a lifetime of anticipation, years and years of near-death experiences like the one Pigsy has only just survived, years and years with nothing to fill her head or her belly, sustained only by the promise that one day he would appear and give her life a purpose.

She doesn’t need an altar to feel that reverence. She doesn’t need to bow her head to know worship, or to feel it resonate in every part of her. She does not understand how the monks — and Pigsy too, so it seems — can find succour in things without names or souls.

She doesn’t ask him about it. It wouldn’t be her place to intrude on something so deeply personal, even if they were the best of friends. And they’re certainly not that. Pigsy has little worth keeping, but this is his own: his faith, his prayers, and his quiet reverence.

Choosing her words with care, Sandy says, “You look better.”

“I think I feel better too.” He smiles again, and this time it touches every part of him, right down to the space behind his eyes, the glittering sunlight once hidden by clouds. “Nice to see you walking on your own,” he adds after a beat, and Sandy pretends not to notice the way the words tug at the edges of his smile, drawing it tight. “That mean I can get my rake back soon?”

Sandy nods. “When we leave this place and return to the quest.”

She doesn’t realise how heavy that statement is until she sees him react. The meditative looseness leaves his shoulders and he draws them back tight, almost defensive.

She remembers how her own shoulders would tighten like that during her more difficult conversations with the Scholar, the lessons she knew she would never learn, the moments she was so sure would end with him throwing up his hands and giving up on her completely; he’d be gone for days after those arguments, and her left alone, waiting and despairing, hating herself, utterly convinced that she’d ruined it, that she would never see him again, that he’d _abandoned_ —

Pigsy says, “We?”

Sandy returns to the present, to the moment sitting for the first time in her hand, not his.

It’s not a given, she realises. That he would be welcome, that he would be invited, that the quest would still have a place for him. After everything she went through to bring him back, after everything she dragged him through as well, it should be all but stated by now, but Sandy supposes she can understand why it might not be.

Intentional or not, she is the reason he still has to catch his breath between long sentences.

So, understanding his need for reassurance, she straightens her spine and confirms: “ _We_.”

He lets that sit a beat, wetting his lips with his tongue as though testing the word’s flavour.

Then, ever so quietly, he says, “You know, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if it wasn’t.”

Given his choice of activities since recuperating, it’s not completely unexpected. And there is surely a great deal to be said for choosing the company of monks after years in the company of demons.

Still, Sandy shakes her head.

“I dragged you out of the barren lands,” she reminds him. “I brought down a demon prison and mortally wounded—”

Pigsy clears his throat. “I remember it,” he says, a little sharply. “You don’t need to go into all the gory details, yeah?”

“Sorry.” She means it. The intention was not to make him relieve his pain, no more than he ever means to make her relive hers when he touches her. “I only mean to say that we have both been through a great deal of suffering, specifically so that I could bring you back to the quest. Do you think I’ll stand aside and let you leave it again? Even for a place like this?”

A place of peace, she means.

Perhaps, too, a place of penance.

For him, at least, it could be.

She can understand why it might not be such an unpleasant thought to him, leaving the quest after all to seek out a quieter life here. Tending the sick and wounded who pass by, whiling away his days in prayer and meditation, slowly healing the lacerations around his soul through care and diligence and helping others. Repenting, lazy and effortless as is his wont, in the company of those for whom forgiveness is a second skin.

Simple, no? To bow one’s head, pray before an altar, and call it atonement.

As though reading her mind, Pigsy murmurs, “I could do some good here.”

“You could do far more good on the quest,” Sandy points out, with none of the gentleness she knows Tripitaka would encourage. “I didn’t bring you back for you to leave again the very moment a more comfortable position became available.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

He seems to really believe that. Sandy forces herself to soften, forces herself to find some patience, a shred of willingness to hear him out. He has, at the very least, earned that.

“Then what?” she demands, voice tight.

He lifts one shoulder. Sandy thinks she sees a flash of discomfort cross his face, but it’s gone before she can be sure.

“Just seemed like a good compromise,” he murmurs. “A good place. Respectable, safe. So you won’t have to worry...”

“Ah.” She means to sound cold, a bite of winter wind, but it comes out rather more brittle than she intends. “So I won’t have to worry that you’re making a ‘business partner’ of the first demon who crosses your path the moment we save goodbye? So I won’t have to worry that you will one day do to someone else what you—”

Her mouth clamps shut, drowning the sentence before it can finish itself.

Pigsy bites down as well, but he doesn’t flinch from the truth as she did.

“What I did to _you_.”

She’s never seen him so determined, his spine perfectly straight, as if facing judgement. As if she is worthy of passing it. He must know, as well as she does, that she is not. Even after—

What he just said.

What she can’t—

She shakes her head, unable to speak.

Pigsy swallows, and continues for them both. “What I did to you,” he says again. Then, more, voice rising on each word: “And to all the other gods I locked up or sold off. And to all the humans I drove out of their homes. All the stuff I pretended not to see or hear or know about. All the blood I ordered other people to spill so I could take the credit.” His breathing is ragged, rattling; Sandy suspects it has nothing to do with his ribs or his lungs this time, and everything to do with what hides behind them. “All that. Right?”

Sandy forces herself to swallow, to breathe, to say something. “All that,” she manages, a hollow, broken sort of echo. “Yes.”

Pigsy nods, ignoring her obvious distress. “None of that stuff here,” he points out, and his low, even tone helps to bring her back to the present. “These monks... I mean, you know what their kind is like. All that helpful-holy stuff.” His smile is wry, but behind it Sandy can see a flicker of real warmth. “They’re good people. You know that, I know that. They’ll keep me on the right side. Keep me humble. Keep me honest.”

If anyone can, they can. Sandy knows it’s true.

“Keep you out of trouble,” she concedes softly. 

“Right.” He holds out a hand, but doesn’t touch her; his fingertips hover in the space between them, shimmering a little with incense-smoke. Looking closely, Sandy thinks she sees them trembling. “And you can go back to the quest and never have to think about it again.”

“It.” Her voice trembles too; she wonders if she can blame the smoke here as well. “You mean you.”

“I...” He sighs. “Yeah, if you like. No more bad memories following you around with a rake. None of that stuff that happens when I touch you or you look at me. No more anger or pain or whatever else is spinning around in that head of yours. No more...” He withdraws his hand, presses it instead to his chest, the sun-warm skin where the bruises once stained. “No more losing control.”

Because they both know that’s her truest fear. Not him, not his eyes or his hands or his ‘whatever else’. _Herself_ , just like Tripitaka said.

It is tempting. She won’t deny that. To bid him farewell, here in this place where they can both be sure he’ll do no more harm. To turn away again, one last time, for good, and imagine that it will finally be the end of it.

So tempting to let herself believe that’s how it would really be. Peace for him and freedom for her: a happy ending to two terrible, tangled, intertwined lives.

But of course, it’s only an illusion, not real at all.

“Those things won’t go away,” she tells them both, staring at his shaking hand, his unbruised chest. “Even if you did.”

Pigsy studies her for a long, quiet beat. Then, like a waterskin drained of its contents, his whole frame slumps. “Yeah.”

Sandy turns away from him. Closes her ears to the rhythm of his breathing, laboured again now for reasons that have nothing to do with broken ribs and everything to do with this, with her, with—

Them.

She thinks back to the barren lands. To his whining and wailing, his endless, needless demands for food and rest and easiness, the way he would time them so well, coinciding a little too neatly with the moments she became stuck inside her dark corners. To the way he told her, quiet but earnest, that she was not the only one with bad memories.

She says, very quietly, “Not for you either, I imagine.”

Pigsy chews on the inside of his cheek. Thoughtful, troubled, wearing his emotions on his sleeve as he so often does. A part of her can’t help admiring him for that; even now, with all her pain and anger cast about for everyone to see, she still can’t resist the instinct to try and hide it and herself, to duck behind the curtain of her hair or under the hood of her cloak, to seek out the dark places, shadowy and shrouded and safe, where she might be less visible, less vulnerable, less seen.

She could never look at him — could never look at anyone, she’s sure — the way he’s looking at her now, with all his grief and guilt and shame right there on his face, unmistakable and undeniable.

“Maybe you were right,” he says at last, and sighs like the weight of the world is settled in his lungs. “Maybe I am just looking for the easy way out. A ‘more comfortable position’ or whatever it was you said I’m after.”

Sandy ducks her head, takes comfort in the weight of her hair shielding her eyes. “That, yes.”

“Be nice to pretend I could hide from it.” Another sigh, and then he closes his eyes as though indulging some blissful fantasy. “Nicer to look back, you know, imagine you being all happy and well-adjusted, side-by-side with those two goofballs on that blasted quest. Maybe even smiling sometimes. Maybe...”

He stops, but she hears the unvoiced word: _healing_.

Sandy doesn’t know if such a thing is really possible for her. At the very least, it’s a distant, unfathomable thing right now, more far-off than water in the middle of the desert.

“I might forget you,” she says. “In time, if you weren’t there. Forget your face, forget your voice, maybe even forget your hands.” She swallows, pain and horror curling like nausea in her stomach. “You, maybe I could forget. But I won’t ever, ever forget _them_.”

His ‘friends’. The ones he never stopped.

He probably only saw the smallest fragment of what they did.

He turned away before they ever started.

Humans with power are so much more dangerous than gods.

They both know that.

Gods, at least most of them, live through their whole lives with the elements in their blood. They can’t be so easily corrupted by their own powers, not when they’re as much a part of them as breath or blood.

Not like humans. Not like those flesh-and-bone monsters; they become so easily addicted to everything they touch. They see the lightning crackle for the first time on the tips of their fingers and immediately believe themselves immortal.

Humans will do the most terrible things just to prove that they can.

Just to prove—

Eyes still shut, as though reliving those moments he never even saw, Pigsy says, “I could have stopped them.”

Sandy thinks, _I did stop them_.

And she did. Again and again. Stopped their cruel deeds, stopped their crueller words. Stopped their hearts, stopped their breath, stopped their everything. And the Scholar said — and the monk said, and everyone has said — that this made her worse than he could ever be.

Her fists clench at her sides. They miss the weapons that kept her upright, the twin powers of lightning and water. Her legs shake; they miss being supported. Her heart—

“I did stop them,” she blurts out, speaking the terrible truth aloud and stopping her heart before it can make itself heard. “The one thing you didn’t do, I...” She pauses, then sighs. “No: the _two_ things you didn’t do. I stopped them, and I killed humans.”

He blanches, but doesn’t flinch like she would. “I know,” he says in a haunted whisper. “I remember.”

Perhaps he does. Perhaps he only thinks he does. His mind is more whole than hers; perhaps it is more talented at putting together the smaller pieces of bigger wholes. He never saw it happen, only the aftermath.

Only the bodies.

His friends.

His—

Sandy presses her knuckles to her mouth. Breathes through her nose and swallows, swallows, swallows.

“So where does that leave us?” she asks, when she trusts herself to speak again. “A god who could have acted but didn’t, and one who did act but shouldn’t have. I did worse things than you by far. I did unforgivable things, I—”

“You had good reasons,” he says. “We... _I_ gave you plenty of reasons.”

Sandy thinks that’s the closest thing to a confession he’s ever let out.

She doesn’t know how to accept it, doesn’t even know if she really wants to, so instead she asks, in a whisper almost as hoarse as his, “So which one of us is the monster?”

Pigsy bows his head. Like in worship, only he’s not looking at the altar now; he’s looking at her.

“I can’t answer that,” he says, with real regret. “But I...”

The catch in his breath, cutting him off, is worse than anything Sandy has ever heard from him. Worse even than the ragged, rattling rasp of his broken ribs, of his punctured lungs, of his _dying_ —

Sandy’s knuckles, still pressed to her mouth, tighten as she balls a fist.

It’s all she can do, that little spasm of violence, to keep herself from turning around and running, fleeing from this place and never looking back. Now that her legs are mended, there’s nothing to stop her instincts from overpowering her completely, hauling her away from here, guiding her back to the shadows, the sewers, back to the dark, sacred places where she can hide and hide and hide and _hide_ —

Perhaps she is the coward, after all.

Coward, monster, demon.

So many things they called each other.

And now...

“What?” she hears herself rasp, choking on her fist.

She watches his body bend as he turns back to the altar. Back bowed, spine forming a perfect curve, his face shrouded in shadow, he gazes at the candles and the little carved figures, and when he finally does speak the words are aimed at them, not her. Easier, Sandy supposes, to make confessions to inanimate objects. Easier than having to look at the person who actually needs to hear them.

She allows it. If their positions were reversed, she knows she would be hiding too.

“Here’s the thing,” he says to the carved figures, the flickering candles, the incense sticks. “I look at you, and I see _them_.”

Sandy’s whole body stiffens. The only _them_ she knows is his friends, his humans, his—

“Them.” She can barely get the word out, distorted and strangled by her hand, her fist, her survival instincts. “Them who?”

“All of them.” His voice warps as well, like he’s speaking through a wall of water. “Every god I sold to the highest bidder. Every human I kicked out of their home for not paying enough. Every scrawny little demon urchin I made ‘disappear’ so that they wouldn’t grow up and challenge Locke’s authority. All of them, every last one. Every time I look at you, every time you look at me. Every time you tell me I’m a...”

His back bends, quivering. Sandy swallows and says, “Monster.”

“Yeah.” He’s bracing himself on the altar, like it’s the only thing holding him upright. “Like I don’t already know. Like I could ever bloody forget.”

Sandy draws her fist away from her mouth; there are tooth-marks embedded deep in the flesh. “I see.”

He ignores her. Probably he doesn’t even hear her, he’s so lost in himself. “So you killed a few low-life humans. They would’ve done a whole lot worse to you, given half a chance. Believe me, I saw it happen.”

Sandy did too.

Sometimes more than just saw.

She says, “They were monsters too.”

She expects him to argue. To shake his head, at least, or tell her she doesn’t understand. Something, anything to give his friends some credibility, to give himself some, vicariously, by defending them.

Instead, he only says, “Yeah, they were.”

It gives her no comfort.

“I made myself believe it was that simple,” Sandy says. “For a long, long time, I told myself that’s all it was. They were monsters, and I was just trying to survive. But monsters or not, they were _human_. And I was—”

She was a god.

She was desperate, she was dangerous, she was powerful.

She was—

“You were what we made you.” There is no regret in his voice, only acceptance and a kind of understanding that makes Sandy’s ribs squeeze her lungs. “What the whole bloody world made you. You and I both know we weren’t the first to call you ‘demon’.”

It’s true.

It—

It makes her legs buckle, the raw power of it, and sends lightning-bolts of pain arcing through every nerve in her body. Not physical, it runs far deeper than broken bones or torn-up flesh.

She blinks rapidly, on the verge of passing out, but holds herself upright by stubbornness and muscle memory. It takes every ounce of strength she possesses to keep her mind from going back there, to keep herself from remembering the past before the past he knows, the pain before the pain he caused, the demon she was before he made the word mean ‘scapegoat’.

“What was done to me,” she whispers, “doesn’t change what I did to others. I was a god, they were human. Whatever terrible things they did, they were human. They didn’t stand a chance.”

Finally, Pigsy turns away from the altar. He moves slowly, with a lingering reverence, and studies her with candlelight reflected in his eyes. It transforms him, she thinks, the depthless black shifting to flecked gold.

“None of us did,” he tells her, soft and sober. “Not you, not me, not them. The world’s stacked against all of us.”

And then, miraculously, he smiles.

Sandy doesn’t understand, but she knows that she’s blinded by it.

“You say that like it’s a good thing,” she says, feeling her muscles seize.

“No,” he says. “It’s not good. But it’s why we’re on this blasted quest in the first place, isn’t it? Because we’ve been there. Because we know what this world is and what it does. Because we know — better than that simian idiot, sleeping away in his rock for five hundred years — how bloody important it is to try and make it better.”

It is breathtakingly poetic, coming from him.

Would be poetic, she thinks, from anyone.

But from him, yes, it steals away her breath.

Sandy looks at the altar. Crude carvings, shallow candles, and little wisps of smoke that rise up and fill her head, making her feel sick and scared. She thinks of Locke and her god-built prison, of the demon sentinels and their cliff-home in the barren lands, how similar and yet how different. She thinks of the smoke filling her lungs and her head, unconsciousness and vertigo and confusion: subjugation turned to something terrible.

She thinks of the world that has created such monsters. Demons who barter in bodies and souls and lives. Humans, corrupted and cowed by their masters, so crushed and powerless that they would do the most unspeakable things just to feel like they can still control something. Gods left with no choice but to become one of them, or else kill and become something worse. No hope of a good life, no hope of clean hands or a clean conscience, only—

Only _survival_.

And now this.

A quest.

A glimmer of hope.

Sandy thinks of Tripitaka, whose name kept her heart beating even through the years when she wanted it to stop. She thinks of the Scholar, who told her to wait, to help, to—

To try and make the world better.

Perhaps to make herself as well, if she can.

If there’s enough hope left over.

Only one way to find out, she supposes.

If she has learned anything from her time in the barren lands, limping and staggering and barely able to stand, it is that.

One step at a time.

One _quest_ at a time.

And for now...

“I think,” she says, to Pigsy and herself, “it’s about time we got back to it.”

Pigsy smiles. Faint and flickering, like the altar candles, but warm as well.

“You know,” he says. “I think you’re right.”

*


	15. Chapter 15

*

It’s not the end.

It’s not even a beginning.

It’s more of the same, only different.

It’s—

It’s the four of them, back on the road, back out in the world, back on the quest.

Exactly the same as it was.

Exactly the same as— 

As so many things, so it seems.

Sandy feels exactly the same as she did when they left Palawa. Out in the great wide world for the first time, she was overwhelmed, she was terrified, she was drowning. She was surrounded by people and voices and bodies on all sides and she could not move, could not think, could not breathe.

She feels exactly the same as she did when they entered the barren lands. Parched and panicked and pale, dehydrated before they even set foot in the wasteland that would wreck them all. Weak, worthless, worn down by dread and discomfort, but determined, so determined to prove she was more than what her helpless body tried to make her.

She feels exactly the same as she did the night before they ventured out, the night she sat in front of the fire and whittled away at a knot of wood. Hiding in plain sight, with her head down and her eyes on her hands and the edge of a blade as close as it could get to her skin. Trying not to think, trying not to be seen.

She feels exactly the same as she did in the demons’ desert prison. Swallowed and suffocated, drugged and dizzy and delirious, crushed and claustrophobic, blind to everything but the taste of water and the certainty that it was life, that it was her only safety, her only escape. Clinging to it because she knew that she would surely die without it.

She feels exactly like all those things, and she feels wholly, entirely different.

She walks, stronger now but not ashamed to lean on her scythe when she needs to. Not wincing, not groaning, not losing her balance, but acutely aware of her still-mending body and its limitations. Effortful, yes, but in a comfortable way, a familiar, rejuvenating way. Healed, at least in the places that can be measured.

Monkey, falling easily into step beside her, grins and says, “Good to see you walking again. You’re heavier than you look.”

“Am I?” She musters a smile in return. It’s rather dimmer than his, but then most things are; when Monkey chooses to shine, even the sun goes into hiding. “Perhaps the great Monkey King isn’t quite as strong as he thought he was, hm?”

He laughs, then elbows her in the ribs.

Hard.

It’s making a point, the contact: that he is not treating her gently. That he knows he doesn’t need to any more, that he never really wanted to in the first place, that he—

That he knows, perhaps, that hard and rough is the only thing her instincts don’t respond to.

“Please,” he snorts, giving her another quick nudge. “Like I didn’t prove myself by hauling that big lug all the way to...”

Understandably, he stops.

They turn together, as one, looking over their shoulders to where Pigsy is lagging behind them all, carrying their supplies as usual, huffing and puffing like he always does, breathing heavily, grumbling, complaining...

The same, again, but so, so different.

Sandy’s heart stops now when his breath stutters. Her chest grows tight when he loses his footing or trips or falls. Her pulse leaps in her neck when he draws to a stop, bending double to catch his breath, and she hears the click in Monkey’s throat as his body responds with the same wordless dread.

It takes her rather longer than she would ever admit, to catch her own breath.

She twists her features into a scowl, and says to Pigsy, “You’re slowing us down.”

What else can she say? What can she do, except the same as she always has?

If he catches the note of worry in her voice, he doesn’t comment on it. If he catches the shadows behind her eyes, or Monkey’s, he does a remarkable job of looking elsewhere.

“Maybe you’re going too fast,” he counters. “Shouldn’t you be taking it easy on your leg or something?”

Sandy huffs. “I heal better through exercise.” And she tries, fails, _tries_ to smirk. “Perhaps your ribs would do the same, if you were willing to walk for more than a few steps without fishing for another complaint.”

Monkey snickers. “Good one.”

It’s not, but she thinks it bodes well that they can pretend it is.

Tripitaka, characteristically serious, drags them all back down by saying, “You should both be taking it easy.”

Against her will, Sandy’s free hand finds the hilt of her knife, sheathed at her hip. Gripping tightly, an echo of the tension suddenly rippling through her body, the memory of sand and dust shifting and swirling under her boots, the difficulty of moving, the way the ground would not stay still.

She doesn’t want to take it easy. She doesn’t want to slow down like Pigsy does, bending double to remind himself that he can still breathe; she doesn’t want to lose the pressure on her legs, the pull and the tug and the dull, easing ache. She doesn’t want to forget the pain that brought her here — brought _them_ here, him too, even when he couldn’t breathe — or pretend that it didn’t shape her.

Not just in her legs. Not just the tug and the ache and the pull. Not just—

Not just now. She doesn’t know how to exist without an undercurrent of pain in every movement, every breath, every thought.

She’s not sure she’s ready to find out.

Even with Tripitaka there by her side.

Even with Monkey grinning his insults and flicking her forehead or elbowing her in the ribs or nudging her shoulder, even with all those subtle little ways he has of making physicality — no, of making _touch_ — into something her body can tolerate.

Even with Pigsy—

Even with him hurting too. Even with her now able to understand that.

Understand _him_. A little better, a little more, a little—

She bites down on the inside of her cheek, waits for the burst of blood.

“We’ve lost a lot of time,” she says.

Tripitaka shoots her a pointed, predictable look.

“We made it through the barren lands,” he reminds her. “Without... that is, uh, _almost_ without any casualties. I think it’s okay to take it easy for a few days now we’re out.” No doubt he thinks his smile is reassuring; in truth it’s quite the contrary, making the unease in Sandy’s stomach churn even more vividly. “The scrolls aren’t going anywhere.”

Sandy could argue that, if she had a mind to. From her experience, there are few things more likely to end in tears than underestimating the difficulty of a task before it’s done.

It is tempting to say so, if only to grant herself a little victory, but she doesn’t. Because Tripitaka’s smile may be disarming and unsettling, but it is also radiant and beautiful and impossible. He looks at her and Monkey like they are everything, like they mean the world to him, and he looks back at Pigsy too, like maybe he means just as much in his own way, and he looks at them all, each of them in turn, like they are the most important three people he’s ever known.

Companions. Friends.

Family, perhaps, given enough time and trust.

The thought makes her shiver. A bad shiver, the kind that always comes with the impossible thought of belonging to something, but a good shiver too, a little bit like hope. It makes her fingers flex over the haft of her scythe, makes her wonder if this was what she wanted or simply what she always assumed she did. The story she tried to tell, to imagine herself a part of something, because that’s how heroes’ stories are supposed to go and that’s what a reward is supposed to taste like.

She thinks it should be so much easier, to know what she really wants.

She looks up at Monkey, strutting playfully at her side, and then back again at Pigsy as he pauses for the dozenth time to catch his breath. She looks at Tripitaka, watches him watching them with that fond, beautiful smile on his face, and she wishes that she could feel things as simply as he does. To see such goodness in everyone, even the most undeserving...

She swallows down a sudden lump in her throat, and walks a bit faster.

*

They make camp early, as usual at Tripitaka’s behest.

“There’s no point in pushing ourselves too hard,” he insists, cutting off Monkey’s protests before they can start. “Better to rest too much than too little. We don’t want to wear ourselves out and lose a whole week to burnout or exhaustion or...”

He trails off, glancing without subtlety at Sandy’s leg.

Sandy glares. “I’m not the one who keeps slowing us down,” she points out, hearing her voice rise. “And I’m not the one who had to stop every three steps to catch his breath or complain. I’m not the one who...”

Her stomach clenches, cutting off her words and her breath.

All of a sudden, with that one abandoned sentence, she finds that maybe she doesn’t mind so much that she’s the one Tripitaka is staring at. If it’s easier for him to think of her injuries, visceral but otherwise harmless, who is she to take that comfort away from him? Indeed, perhaps it’s kinder for all of them, to lay the blame on the one who only had to contend with pain and dehydration than have to look at the one who almost—

Who _did_ —

Who might be dead still, if Monkey wasn’t so strong or so fast.

Sandy’s fingers clench in rhythm with her stomach.

“Perhaps,” she concedes, “it’s not such a terrible idea, after all.”

And she sits, stretching her legs out in front of her.

It’s not really an invitation for company, but Tripitaka takes it as one just the same; Sandy wonders what it says about their relationship — and about herself — that she knew he would and doesn’t try to stop it. He makes a feint at tact, at least, sidling up to her and running a critical eye over her tattered, torn clothing.

Like that’s the part of her that really needs mending. 

It has, by her own admission, seen better days. The damage is more obvious than ever without the bandages to cover up the rips and holes, binding the tears in the fabric as surely as the tears in her flesh. After so many days spent held together by tourniquets and wrappings, poultices and strips of other people’s clothes, Sandy feels strangely vulnerable covered now by only her own. They serve her well enough, of course, just as they always have, but still.

Much like the act of walking, the way it is suddenly strange and uncomfortable to not have to lean her full weight on borrowed limbs, there is a strangeness now to having her legs on display again.

“I could stitch up those tears,” Tripitaka offers. “If you’d like.”

Sandy laughs. “There are more tears in my clothes,” she points out, “than there is thread on the entire continent.”

Tripitaka doesn’t return her laugh, but he seems warmed to hear it.

“I’d still like to try,” he says softly. “Next time you bathe, maybe.”

The perseverence doesn’t really surprise her. It is a simple thing, to mend clothes, even clothes as far beyond salvation as hers. Far simpler than stitching up flesh or knitting bone or weaving the fabric of life back together from nothing. Far simpler to stop fabric from fraying than to try — mortal and human and limited as he is — to stop his god companions from pulling themselves and each other to pieces.

Sandy might not understand the monk’s yearning to do good, to mend all wounds or balm all pain that crosses his path, but she certainly understands the other thing she sees in him: the need to hide from his own helplessness.

She is an expert in hiding, and an expert in feeling helpless. She recognises the particular kind of desperation burning in Tripitaka’s eyes now, the reflected deflection as he gazes at her torn clothing, the clarity of needing to do anything, even if it’s meaningless, just so he can claim he did something.

And so, flinching only a little, she nods.

“As you wish,” she concedes, swallowing her shyness. “I’m sure you’ll work miracles on them.”

“I doubt that.” And then, at last, he does return her laugh. “But I appreciate that you’d let me try.”

He reaches out, then, as if to pat her leg, but catches himself before making contact. Progress, Sandy thinks, and marvels at her body’s lack of response. She watches him climb to his feet and move off to help Pigsy start a fire, breathing in the clean air of expanding space, and trying not to feel as small and useless as she is.

Monkey, lounging on the other side of their little campsite, manages to sit still for only a few seconds.

Usually the first to duck out of a chore if someone else proves willing, this time his laziness lasts only as long as it takes for Pigsy to straighten up, cursing his weariness with a grunt and a groan. Sandy hears Monkey’s breath catch even from her distance, and so it is no surprise when he lurches up to his feet, only slightly shaky, and blurts out—

“Sit down, will you?”

They all pretend not to hear the hitch in his voice.

Pigsy turns, blinking. “Problem?”

“You’re doing it all wrong,” Monkey snaps, visibly trying to save face. “Sit your useless butt back down and let the expert handle it.”

Pigsy’s quirked brow makes it clear he knows what Monkey’s really thinking, but he’s savvy enough to keep it to himself.

“Right,” he snorts instead. “Because the ‘great and powerful Monkey King’ is so well known for his talents at manual labour.”

Still, for all his derision, he’s more than happy to take him up on it, abandoning the task with a triumphant — if exaggerated — grin. Sandy wonders how long he’ll take advantage of their fretting, playing up his natural lack of fitness to get out of doing his share of chores, feigning weariness so he won’t have to gather firewood or stand watch or cook.

She finds that doesn’t mind the idea as much as she probably should. 

What she does mind, rather a lot, is the way he takes the opportunity to move towards her.

Slow and careful, yes — he is capable of learning some things, it seems, however hard those lessons come — but still: towards her, purposeful and deliberate and with the intent to sit down, to make himself comfortable, to—

“Don’t,” she hears herself choke.

She doesn’t even realise her hand is on her knife until she looks up and sees that he’s holding something in his hand: a little knot of wood, no doubt salvaged from the fire.

“A better use for that thing than gutting me, eh?” he remarks.

Sandy stares at the wood. Then she stares down at her hand, and sees what he sees: fingers shaking, knuckles white, her grip so tight it would take a vice to pry it open.

She doesn’t let go. She thinks she might have forgotten how.

Instead she draws it. She holds it up to the setting sunlight, watches the yellow-orange-red glint off the cold metal, and says, barely believing it herself, “I won’t gut you.”

He chuckles. “Comforting.”

“I won’t,” Sandy says again, trying to make it stick, trying to make it true. “I already killed you once. It didn’t take. To gut you now would just be...” She tries to smile. “...overkill.”

Bent over their slowly-starting fire, Monkey snickers. “ _Literally_.”

Tripitaka, ever the most serious, sighs and says, “Sandy, please.”

“Leave them be,” Monkey says, and it is so typical of him, so much like a thousand moments before, that Sandy almost feels her shoulders relax. He grins at the monk, then turns back to her and Pigsy, and there is no dimming of his brightness at all when he adds, “Just try and keep each other in one piece from now on, all right? Hauling you two dead-weights around is hell on my back.”

Sandy ignores him. She turns the knife over in her hands, drawing comfort from its weight, its keenness, its familiar strength, and forces herself to look back up at Pigsy. His outstretched hand, the little knot of wood held between then like a white flag, like a peace offering. The look on his face, smiling and sort of hopeful.

“A thoughtful gesture,” she muses, then carefully, _carefully_ takes it.

Carefully, yes because it has to be. Because she is acutely aware of his hand, the open palm, the clumsy fingers, the threat of contact if she shifts a fraction of an atom to the left or the right. It should not feel like the momentous task it is, taking a piece of wood, but her outstretched hand is shaking, and the knife jumps and twitches in the other, blade angled down towards the ground where it can’t hurt anyone, like the little weapon is as hungry for blood as she once was.

As she once imagined he was too.

The wood settles against her palm, surprisingly heavy for something so small. No need to gut him, even if she’d had a mind to: she could quite easily bludgeon him with the thing.

It’s an unwanted thought, and one she can’t silence once it’s there. She wonders, sad and a little bit anxious, if she’ll ever stop thinking like that: every tool a potential weapon, every movement a threat or a warning. Will she ever be able to sit next to him — or anyone else — without a hand on her weapon and at least three escape routes mapped out in her head?

She grips the knife a little tighter, then turns its edge against the wood.

Pigsy waits, watching wordlessly, as she settles into a rhythm, carving and whittling at the little knot, losing herself in the swish of the blade, the drag and draw of resistance and friction, the comforting monotony of motion.

He waits, uncharacteristically patient, until she’s completely absorbed in the task, and then, in a voice so low that even Monkey couldn’t possibly overhear, he says: “I’m sorry, you know.”

The knife catches on the wood.

Sandy takes a deep breath, swallows hard, and adjusts. A couple of false starts, and she finds the rhythm again, a little slower, a little more careful, a little—

“I see,” she says.

Pigsy makes a low sound, an echoey sort of rattle that settles deep in his chest, lodged behind his healing ribs. He’s watching her hands, not her face, so closely that Sandy wonders if he can see the tremors she’s hiding, the ones deeper than skin or bone, deeper even than the blood. Water-deep, ocean-deep, so deep that even the lightning could never reach it.

“I don’t expect it’ll change anything,” he goes on, after a beat. “Just... well, you know. Just realised I hadn’t said it yet. And I figured you deserved to hear it said.”

Sandy doesn’t flatter him by saying she appreciates it. The lie would be too obvious, too empty; it would no more soothe his guilty conscience than it would carve away the scars under her skin. As useless as the knife in her hands, that lie, and they both know it.

So, instead, she says, “I did far worse things than you did.”

She is afraid to look up, afraid of the look on his face, the grief and guilt in his eyes. Perhaps that’s why he gave her the wood in the first place: so that she wouldn’t have to. Perhaps he knows her better than she thinks, perhaps he really does know how to look out for her, how to do right by her, how to make even this most painful of conversations into something she can almost — _almost_ — survive.

“Look,” he says. “Let’s not play that game again, yeah? You did bad stuff, I did bad stuff, we could keep going around in circles for centuries if we keep at it.” Sandy doesn’t look up, but she can feel the air shift as he gestures, waving his big hands for emphasis. “I’m talking about you, okay? Like, specifically, _you_. The stuff that happened to you because of me. Because I didn’t do what I should have done, or because I did what I was told to do and shouldn’t have done, or because... whatever. Pick one, yeah?”

Sandy swallows. Her vision is filmed with salt. She wants to distract herself by whittling but the knot of wood is too blurry; it swims and distorts and won’t stay still.

She says, “I am so much the monster you made me.”

“Don’t.” She can hear the pain in his voice; it doesn’t help. “Don’t call yourself that.”

“I am full of violence,” she tells him, unashamed of the truth even as it leaves her broken. “I could kill you right now, again. I could do it in more than a dozen different ways, without using either of the weapons in my hands.” Her vision blurs some more, but she doesn’t back down. “I can’t shut off the part of myself that knows that. I can’t stop myself from picturing it, over and over and over again, all the things I could do to you, all the ways I could make you bleed or hurt or die.”

She dares to look up, finds Pigsy looking just as stricken as she expects. “Okay...” he says slowly.

“No,” Sandy replies, even though she knows he didn’t mean it that way. “It’s not. Because I can’t stop seeing _them_ , either. The humans I killed, the friends you sent after me. The things they did, the things I did, and all of it because you were too cowardly and too weak to do them yourself. It never ends, Pigsy. Not for a second, not for a moment, and that...”

She stops. She couldn’t finish, even if he wasn’t ravaging her with his sad, guilt-wet eyes.

“I know,” he whispers. “I mean, not first-hand or anything, but I’ve seen...” He swallows, shakes his head; for just a ghost of a breath, Sandy almost believes him. “I get it. I do.”

She tries to blink the salt out of her eyes, tries to swallow the lump in her throat, tries to stop the shaking of her hands. One part of her needs to work, she thinks dully. Just one, just—

“You touched me once,” she hears herself blurt out. “The first time we met. You touched me so gently, so kindly. It was only a moment, but I remember it. The only kindness I’d ever...” 

A spasm seizes her body. Under her fingers, the wood warps and cracks.

“I remember it,” Pigsy whispers. “Fragile little thing, you were, half-starved. Could’ve crushed the life out of you with two fingers if I’d a mind to, but I...”

Sandy says, without thought, “Perhaps you should have.”

“Never.” His eyes darken, gleaming with grief. Sandy wonders if he’s thinking of her body count, the human bones piled up at her feet, or the cowardice that kept his own hands clean all those years. “I wanted to protect you. I tried to—”

“You failed.”

She turns away, then, because she has to, because the alternative is letting her instincts overpower her reason, as they have done too many times already.

She looks at the campfire instead, watches the flames begin to rise, licking lazily at the charred wood beneath. She looks at Monkey and Tripitaka, too, amused by the way they pretend they’re not listening, then at the unused firewood piled high at their feet, readying to join its brethren and burn.

She wishes she could catch fire so easily. Douse herself in water, and let his lightning ignite her blood, her bones, her everything. She thinks, as she has thought so many times over the years, that this would be the only way she’d ever know peace. A moment’s violence, a shriek of chaos, water and electricity and flame, and then—

 _Quiet_.

She wonders what they would do, Monkey and Tripitaka, if she hurled herself onto their carefully-tended fire. 

It scares her to think that they might try to to stop her, almost more than it does to think that they might not.

She doesn’t try.

She hurls the wood instead, cracked and warped and half-carved, and watches with half-blind eyes as it lands right in the middle of the flames.

A fitting effigy, she thinks.

Her hand, now empty, joins the other in gripping the knife. One on the handle, holding it as steady as she can, the other on the blade, caressing the edge, the point, all the big and little places that could draw blood.

Might yet, before the evening is out.

She threads the blade lithely between her fingers, just to prove she can. To prove the steadiness inside is stronger than the tremors rippling the surface. To prove to herself that she still has control where it matters.

She can feel Pigsy watching her, rapt and attentive. She can feel the stillness in his body, still too close, tension like a wire, breath held in like he’s worried she’ll lose focus if he dares to make the slightest sound.

Like he’s afraid she’ll—

The knife slips.

The fading daylight arcs off the blade as it shifts, readying to catch her fingers—

Then stops, suspended, caught between his.

“Gotcha,” he says, letting out all his breath in a single gasp. “No harm done, eh?”

And he flips it around, quick as a blink, and—

One hand poised over her thumb, gently guiding. The other slipping the hilt of the knife back into her hand. Gentle, gentle gentle, every movement, every breath, every touch. _Gentle_ , nothing but compassion and care, nothing but _kindness_ , but still the contact throws her backwards like a lightning-strike, like the wrath of the ocean in a storm, like both their powers striking hard at the same time, a thunderbolt blasting the open water.

She rears back. Angry and frightened, wild and violent, everything she has tried so hard not to be.

She rears back and then she lunges, the knife forgotten as she lashes out instead with a closed fist—

Stops, paralysed by the _crack_ of contact.

Not with his face, not with his ribs or his shoulder, not with any of the dozens of soft places she was blinding swinging for. None of that: it is he who makes contact with her, stopping her flying fist without a thought.

He has her by the wrist—

He has her by the _wrists_. Both of them, one in each huge hand.

His grip is tight. It is powerful. It is—

It is not gentle, it is not careful, and it is not definitely not kind.

For a moment, Sandy’s body doesn’t know how to respond. The familiarity of conflict, of roughness and aborted violence — even like this, instinct on her part and reflex on his — overrides her horror at being touched, leaving her disoriented and confused. She blinks, staring at the points of contact, the pull of his knuckles, the pressure of his fingers, the knife forgotten at their feet, dropped and lost in the scuffle.

She stares at his hands.

He stares at her fists.

Monkey, standing a few paces away with a bundle of wood under his arm and his staff in his hand, groans and mutters, “Not this again.”

Sandy swallows hard, and wills her fists to open.

“No,” she hears herself whisper. “Not this time.”

Pigsy, still holding her wrists, studies her closely.

“You good?” he asks, in a low, careful voice.

Sandy doesn’t know.

But she does know that this — her slender wrists in his huge hands — doesn’t bother her at all.

The contact is undeniable.

But her body’s response...

It’s not _touch_ , she realises.

It never was.

She should have realised, she supposes. Should have—

But of course that would mean understanding herself.

Monkey touches her all the time. He flicks her forehead and elbows her in the ribs; he nudges her shoulder, he picks her up and carries her, and her only response is to nudge him back and fidget and try to make his task more difficult.

His touch has never made hers ignite like Pigsy’s does, has never made her insides fly apart like Tripitaka’s does, has never left her feeling torn up and vulnerable like the monks’ healing ministrations at the monastery. He touches her and he touches her and he touches her, and she just rolls her eyes and touches him back.

Touch for touch, time and time again, gone without a passing thought.

And now this.

Pigsy, and two very different responses to two very different kinds of touch.

Now:

Her fist, floundering, flailing, flying at his face. His fingers wrapped around her wrists: restraint, conflict, fervour.

Not aggressive, but not soft either. A combatant’s response to the threat of combat. And she, accepting it without reflex, without response; her fists, balled and shaking just a moment ago, creak open now and her wrists hang limp and loose in his hands.

But then:

One hand anchoring her thumb, the other wrapping hers around the handle of her knife. His fingertips, feather-light, delicate, gentle, careful, _kind_.

And she reared back, and she balled her fists and she bared her teeth and she lashed out—

And not just him.

And not just now.

The Scholar’s hand, reaching out: an offer of help, a lesson in compassion.

Tripitaka’s palm covering her knuckles, her leg, her arm.

A monk binding her leg, another carefully washing the sweat from her face.

 _Kindness_.

Kindness, and the moment that comes after, inevitable as the sunset, dazzling and blinding as the flash when it sinks below the horizon, the moment it transforms into violence.

The moment she is so, so afraid of.

Inevitable as the sunset, yes. She knows this; it’s the one lesson she did learn, the one she wrapped around herself and held close for all those years: that kindness transforms into cruelty.

Violent, visceral, always sudden, but yes, _inevitable_ , a cataclysm like lightning on the open water, setting fire to things that cannot burn.

The violence she knows. The violence she anticipates, expects. Her body responds to violence as it responds to the beat of its own heart. She knows it, she understands it, and—

And she meets it, every time, with her own.

But _kindness_...

The warm eyes of a warm-hearted monk. The flicker of recognition from one damaged god to another. The soft, sweet smile of someone who feels, who cares, who—

This. Yes.

This is what frightens her. This, kindness. This is what makes her body seize and freeze and shake, this is what makes her throat constrict and the violence pool like poison in her belly. This is what sharpens her survival instincts, what whets her reflexes until they gleam, until they’re keen enough to crush a god, until—

This.

 _Kindness_.

Because she has endured a lifetime of pain — of unspeakable, inhuman, hellish pain — and nothing she has ever endured hurts more than the moment — awful, brutal, inevitable — when kindness becomes cruelty, when softness hardens into hatred, when all those sweet, soft, gentle things twist and transform into rejection into abandonment, into—

It is the only truth she knows.

Like an animal, beaten until it bites any hand that comes close, she anticipates it. Like a demon or a feral god, chased and cornered, trapped and wild and desperate, she expects it.

Like the monster they made her. Unable to trust, unable to connect, unable to—

Unable to accept a kind touch without bracing for the moment it transforms.

She looks at Pigsy’s knuckles, the skin pulled taut where he’s gripping her wrists.

She says, to herself, “I understand.”

He doesn’t resist when she pulls free. Perhaps he understands too, a little of the revelation she can’t give a voice, because he doesn’t ask and he doesn’t push.

He just shrugs, flashes a grin that only halfway touches his eyes, and says, “Glad to hear it.”

Sandy bends to retrieve her knife. She holds it up to the light for a moment, lets it catch the reflection of a lifetime’s worth of spilled blood, hers and theirs. She wonders, frightened and sad, how much more she’ll have to spill before she can let go.

A question without an answer. Perhaps it’s better that way.

She slips the knife back into its sheath, and sits back down.

*

That night she dreams of their first meeting.

Her and Pigsy, that day in the alley: her small and shivering, him towering above her, and the last kind touch she would know for many, many years.

Transformed, as they always were, into violence.

She dreams of what came before. Of pain and fear, of demon-smoke and drugs muddling her mind, of the wild-animal desperation that still runs in her blood even now. She dreams of humans taunting her, teasing her, mocking her, their voices rising high with bloodlust, taking pride in all the things they want to do to her—

The things they would do, later.

She dreams of Pigsy’s face, closer than it ever was at the time. She dreams of his sad eyes, glimmering with water, and the tug of sorrow at the corners of his mouth. She dreams of his touch, the gentle way he braced her back, the tenderness as he thumbed the dirt from her face, that little flash of kindness in the last moment before it hardened and turned cold.

One hand at her back, the other cupping her face, now as it was then. But this time, as she dreams it, the moment goes on and on and on.

A moment that was, extending into one that wasn’t.

One that never could be, not for either one of them.

She understands. She does.

Why he couldn’t hold on to the kindness that would have killed them both. Why he couldn’t have let his softness show for more than a fraction of a second, why he was so afraid. Every ounce of pain he poured into her afterwards, every moment of suffering; just as the Scholar tried to teach her, all those years later, she understands now that he was a victim as well.

His weakness, his cowardice, the bending of his spine and the crushed remains of his courage. His life, draped as it was in gold and silver and jewels, was no more living than hers, hiding in fear in the dirt and filth.

She understands.

And she dreams now, at last, of a moment more compassionate to them both.

A moment he was never able to give, and a moment she would never have accepted even if he had.

His hand, lingering at her face, brushing away the dirt, the decay, the demon she would become.

His other hand, bracing her back, strengthening and supporting and holding her steady. A guardian, a protector, a worthy use at last for the soft heart that wept so openly for all the gods he could not save.

Neither of them can undo what was. Pigsy can’t undo his choices, his words, his cowardice; he can’t turn around now, countless years later, and simply shrug off the consequences of those things as if they held no power. He can only live with them, carry their weight as he carries their supplies, and try as best he can to repent.

To make good, just as he says.

And Sandy, too, can’t go back and uncondition her body’s instincts, its reflexes, its responses to a lifetime of pain and fear and violence. She can’t unflinch, can’t unreact, can’t unsurvive. If she could, she wouldn’t be here in the first place.

She will never forget. She can’t. Her body is honed so tightly, so much in tune with the experiences that forged it, that broke it in daylight and then mended it in the shadows, stronger and more powerful but forever changed.

She dreams, and his gentle touches don’t grow hard.

She dreams, and his warm eyes don’t grow cold, his jaw doesn’t tighten, he doesn’t turn away.

She dreams, and he shows all the courage he couldn’t show in life.

She dreams, and he is kind. Without condition, without change, without any of the dreadful things that followed when the world was real. He holds her, and he touches her without intent, without transformation, without any of the awful things she knows should always follow these kinds of touches.

She dreams, and he is _kind_.

And she, unable to endure such a frightening thing even in a perfect dream, flinches and rears back and—

And she, even in a perfect dream where kindness carries no condition, howls and lashes out with her fists.

Even in a dream, her instincts hold more power than her mind.

Even in a dream, her body is the monstrous thing it was made.

Even in a dream, perfect and beautiful and safe, she is a thing of violence, a finely-sharpened blade just waiting for a vein to catch.

And it does. And she does. And she—

She wakes.

Bolting back to consciousness, her body pulled bowstring-tight, tears blurring her vision, hating herself more than she ever hated him.

Her head is full of noise, whispers of kindness and screams of violence, of Pigsy’s gentle touches and the wracking pains in her chest.

Her hands are shaking.

She’s gripping her knife between them, clutching it to her chest like a child’s toy, her faithful protector from the kinds of demons that only visit at night, the evil things she can only slay in dreams.

She feels like a monster, wild and dangerous and ready to draw blood, and at the same time she feels young and small and desperately afraid.

It is the middle of the night, and Tripitaka is standing over her, his still, silent body bathed in moonlight.

He’s watching her closely, as anyone with any sense would, but keeping a careful, measured distance. Far enough away that Sandy can be sure her fists or her knife won’t accidentally find his face.

Far enough that she knows he can’t touch her either.

He’s standing there on purpose, she can tell, keeping his distance because he knows that it would startle her — no, worse, scare her — if he tried to come closer. He’s standing back, biting down on the parts of him that want to help, to touch to show compassion, because he knows that his definition of safety is her definition of danger. He is resisting all his own instincts because he understands hers.

“It’s okay,” he says.

Just that. Just words. Spoken from a distance, as close to safe as she’ll ever get.

Sandy’s instincts, ravaged and made sharp by a lifetime of pain and fear and anger, scream at her not to believe him.

For once, she ignores them.

She sits up, scrubs a hand across her sweat-streaked face, and whispers, “I know.”

Tripitaka doesn’t move. His arms are outstretched, an invitation without intrusion.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.

Sandy shakes her head.

Then, slowly, she nods.

“Kindness,” she says, hating the tremor in her voice and the echoing tremors in her heart. “Kindness and compassion. Touch that didn’t end in violence.” She turns, gesturing limply at Pigsy’s still-snoring form. “Him, doing the right thing.”

“Oh.”

Tripitaka does not sound as surprised as she thought he would. Sandy wonders, not for the first time, how much her sleeping self gave away. Did she scream and shout? Whimper or wail? Lash out with the knife, reach for her scythe? Did she cry?

She is still so unaccustomed to other people being present when she sleeps.

She leans back a little, wringing her hands, feeling useless. Tripitaka watches her without moving, without speaking. Patience radiates from him, warming the air, making her bold.

“It didn’t make any difference,” she says. “I still... reacted.”

With violence, she means, but she’s not sure she can say the word to him, to Tripitaka, who has worked so hard to try and ease those dark things inside her, who wants so badly for this experience to have changed her.

“I heard.” He says it so softly, so simply. Like it’s not another reason to hate herself. “It’s okay.”

Maybe so, but that offers little comfort. “I wish it would stop,” she whispers. “I wish I could...”

“It will,” Tripitaka says, with so much conviction that Sandy quakes a little to hear it. “ _You_ will. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not for a very long time. But you will, Sandy. One day. I promise.”

Sandy wants so badly to believe that.

“I know him,” she says, looking again at Pigsy. “Not completely. I don’t think I’d ever want to know him that well. But better than I did. Better than I...” She swallows, dry and queasy, bracing for a pain that runs so much deeper than broken bones or mangled limbs. “The Scholar was right: he suffered too. He was scared and he was mistreated and he was used. His cowardice, his weakness... it was survival in him, just like the violence and the hiding is survival in me. I know that now. I understand it, I think. But...”

But it’s not enough.

She doesn’t think it ever will be, no matter what Tripitaka says. She can understand him, accept that he has suffered too; she can forgive him, even for the things he said and the things he didn’t do. She can grow and learn all those lessons the Scholar tried so hard to teach her. She can turn her body to steel when he reaches for her, learn to accept contact even from him, but she can’t let go of the thing he made her.

“It’s not just him,” Tripitaka tells her, very quietly. “I’ve been trying to tell you that.”

Sandy breathes deep. The night air is cool, heavy with moisture; they’ve been out of the barren lands for days now, but still her body responds to the fresh water like it’s some vast and fathomless gift.

“He made me,” she says. “My responses, my reactions, they all came from him.”

“I don’t think they did.” He’s gazing at her with starlit sorrow in his eyes; Sandy wants to turn away, to hide her face, but she can’t seem to move. As always, she is suspended in the light he throws. “He did terrible things, to you and to others. No-one’s denying that, and least of all him. But your pain... that’s something so much deeper than one person.”

Sandy thinks of her life, of all the countless colours of pain and fear, hunger of all kinds.

She was lost long before he found her. She was hated long before he touched her. She—

“I know,” she says, and she wants so badly to cry.

Tripitaka wets his lips. Nervous, perhaps, or else bracing like she is against the colder, harder truth. “It’s easy to paint him as the source of everything. I understand that. It’s easy to hide behind something with a name and a face, something simple. But it’s not just about him, Sandy. And even if you’d never met him, I don’t know that you...” 

He stops. Sandy’s jaw is aching; her mouth is filled with the taste of blood.

“I was hated before I was born,” she agrees softly. “This world...”

“This world is pain for all of us,” Tripitaka says. “And what it’s done to you is terrible. What _he_ did to you was terrible. But he’s just one piece of a bigger...” He swallows; Sandy’s stomach clenches in rhythm with the arc of his throat. “A bigger _problem_.”

Her word. The truth she denied for so long, tucked away and hidden, shameful and angry and wild.

She hates it now, almost more than she hated it then, and she wrenches free at last from that radiant, holy light, and she shudders and she turns away from Tripitaka and she whispers, “Please, don’t.”

But he does.

“You won’t let me touch you that way either,” he reminds her. So gentle, so tender, so full of kindness. If his voice was a touch, her knife would be at his throat. “You only let Monkey touch you because he’s not like that at all. Because he’s rough and playful and crude. Because he doesn’t _care_.”

Sandy thinks of Monkey, the way he was at the monastery, pale-faced and shaken, more deeply affected than he would ever admit by the almost-loss, the dread, the horror. She remembers the way he looked at her, the way he couldn’t bring himself to look Pigsy in the eye, paralysed by fear of what he might find there or what he might not.

“He cares,” she says softly. “Just not with his hands.”

Tripitaka’s laughter is warm and rich. It balms the cold night air, soothing Sandy’s sweat-pricked skin: comfort, the only kind she’s able to swallow down, the kind that comes from afar.

“Don’t let him hear you say that,” he quips. “He takes great pride in not caring.”

Sandy tries to laugh as well, but her throat is razed and too dry. “I’m very afraid of hurting you,” she confesses, apropos of nothing.

The laughter fades, taking some of the warmth with it. “I know.”

Sandy absorbs this, tries to figure out if it’s a comfort or a curse.

“I think I’m afraid of hurting him as well.” 

She means Pigsy, of course, with all his flaws and weaknesses, all his laziness and shame and cowardice. She looks at him again, mapping out the lines of his broad back, his massive shoulders, his whole body smothered by blankets. Lightly snoring, shifting only occasionally, he is a vision of untroubled sleep.

Watching him, counting the rise-and-fall breaths, Sandy tries to imagine the quest without him. He’s had so many opportunities to leave, so many moments when she could have stood back and let it happen, and yet here he is — here they both are — as immovable as the earth beneath them, cool and well fed with water.

Tripitaka is watching her, wordlessly waiting for her to continue. Sandy doesn’t know that she should, but she’s started and it seems silly to stop now.

“I still don’t know if I’m happy he survived,” she admits, and the flush of shame is the first colour she’s felt on her face in a long time. “But I know that I wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t.”

Tripitaka smiles. Radiant, breathtaking, infinitely beatific.

“That’s a start,” he says. “For you, I think, it’s a big step.”

“It is.” Her breath catches, a burst of pain in her chest that makes her think again of the barren lands, of the arid desert air blasting her lungs, of dehydration and survival and the awful rasp of Pigsy’s failing efforts to breathe. “But my feelings and my body are very different things, and I don’t know how to stop...”

“...reacting?” Tripitaka offers, when she fails to finish. “Losing control?”

Sandy winces. She feels razed, like an exposed nerve lashed by a storm.

“I hurt him,” she says. “Killed him, even if it didn’t stick. And I destroyed our supplies, wasted our only source of water in an endless desert. I have wrought so much harm already, Tripitaka, and we’ve scarcely been on the quest for a week.”

She expects the weight of that to land. Expects a grimace, at least, of acknowledgement, but Tripitaka shows no sign of response at all. He’s still smiling, still looking at her with warmth and fondness, with all the kindness and compassion she knows she doesn’t deserve, like he didn’t even hear her. Like he doesn’t understand.

“You did,” he agrees after a beat. A small comfort, she supposes, that even his boundless optimism can’t deny what is true. “But Monkey nearly killed you too, when you first met. And Pigsy tried to sell you both to demons.”

It is far from the worst thing he did, but Sandy keeps that to herself.

“Yes,” she says. “But their actions changed with their feelings. Once they stopped seeing me as an enemy, they stopped treating me as one.” It is true, even of Pigsy; the instant he joined the quest, he forgot they’d ever been anything but the best of friends. “But my body responds to _kindness_ , Tripitaka. My instincts, my responses... I am more afraid of compassion than I am of violence.”

“Of course you are.” Still smiling, still so unbearably soft. Sandy’s body doesn’t know whether to tense or relax; she grips the handle of her knife more tightly, trying to ground herself as he goes on, “Because they’ve always been so interconnected. Right? A moment of kindness, a gentle touch, and then...”

“Yes.” She’s shaking. Her memory screams, rabid animal-howls from her darkest corners. “Yes, ‘and then’.”

“But not any more,” Tripitaka says. Firm, powerful; he speaks now like Monkey touches her, like he knows power is the only way to communicate without breaking her. “Your body will realise that, Sandy. It just needs time, and patience. And—”

“No.” She squeezes the knife tighter, swallows the urge to flip it around, to grip the blade instead. “Don’t.”

He ignores her, of course. “—and _kindness_.”

She knows he’s right. She cannot learn to accept kindness and compassion and friendship from others if she won’t even allow them from herself. Her body will never accept that she’s safe without exposure, without reconditioning, without building new experiences — better experiences, _kinder_ experiences — to replace the old ones.

She knows this.

But it feels so—

“I can’t,” she says, turning the knife over in her hands. The glint of moonlight off the blade, ice-white and eerie, is the only thing keeping her from screaming. “I don’t have those things in me, Tripitaka. I don’t...”

“Maybe not yet,” he says, gentle but firm, soft but sober. “But we have a long quest ahead of us.”

A lot of time, he means.

And a lot of steps. Most of them strong, some inevitably stumbling, perhaps more than a few on ravaged, ruined legs. But always forward, always onward, always—

Always _away_.

Away from what she was. Away from what she did and what was done to her. Away from the pain, away from the violence, away from that life of fear and anger and survival.

Away from the world that is, a bitter, hateful world where kindness has no choice but to become cruelty, where compassion has no choice but to become cowardice, where—

Where gods have no choice but to become monsters.

Away from that, step by painful, wounded step, and towards something better.

Something more hopeful, something more full of life.

A place where kindness and compassion might one day grow and bloom and live.

A place where she might, too.

Far enough away from all the rest that she can forget the awful thing that kindness once meant, and learn the word anew, redefined as what it always should have been.

“A good quest,” she says aloud. “I want to be worthy of it.”

Tripitaka doesn’t say anything. But his smile, bright enough to eclipse even the moonlight, tells her that he thinks she is.

*

She goes back to sleep, for the first time in as long as she can remember, without a weapon in her hand.

Only a waterskin.

Given to her by Tripitaka, because he knew she couldn’t endure the kindness of his touch.

Because he knew—

No.

Because he _knows_.

Because he knows her, because he understands her. Because he knows that she is still at the very beginning of not just one quest but two: the one for the scrolls and the one inside herself. Because he has seen her responses to kindness, to touch, to compassion and empathy and understanding, and he knows that she is not yet ready to accept them.

He knows not to touch her. He knows not to try.

He knows that the best gift for a touch-starved sewer god isn’t contact or comfort or compassion, but water.

The only touch that never caused her pain.

The only kindness that came without cost.

She takes no shame in holding it close, clutching the skin to her chest like a doll, an imaginary protector as she curls up by the fire and wills her body to return to sleep.

It’s good water. This she can tell without tasting a drop. Fresh and clean, drawn from the nearby river, clear and crystalline and untainted by demons or humans or gods. Just water, blessed and beautiful, running from the mountains to the distant sea. Hugging it close to her heart, Sandy can almost forget that they’re closer to the barren lands than to either of those places, that she is closer to the dehydration of the desert than the lush, beautiful spaces where water flows free.

She thinks there might be a poem in that, if she had the mind to write one.

Before she joined the quest, clean water was an unimaginable luxury. Like kindness, like the sort of physical contact that doesn’t grow hard the instant she thinks to accept it, like a gentle word or a breath of compassion, given without expectation or intent. Water that is pure and fresh and sweet, drawn from nature. Water that she doesn’t have to clean by herself, to suck out the poison, the taint of demons and humans alike.

Living in the sewers, where the creeping rot of waste was in everything, she had to do that often. Cleanse and purify, make good the diseased things the world left behind. Always terrible, always an ordeal, to draw out the sickness of others so that she might not fall so sick herself, but still better to suffer under her own hand than under their boots.

It’s not like that any more.

Possibly it will never be like that again.

The water is always clean here, wherever it’s found. Streams or springs, inlets, rivers, pools or ponds or lakes. Like humans and gods, water thrives best in nature. No demons to turn it into something bad, no monsters to make a poison out of something that should be pure.

She wonders what Pigsy would have been like, in a world without demons. What he was like, maybe, in the world that came before. Monkey’s world, so unimaginable to someone born into this one. Was he pure back then? Would he have stayed that way? Clean and calm and moving, like the water in the skin, bubbling and singing its beautiful songs in her mind.

She wonders if she’ll ever be able to see him that way. If there’s a way back for him.

A river can’t run back to its source. This she knows. But she wonders...

Just as she wonders sometimes, against her better judgement, if the same is true for her.

What her life might have been, could have been, should have been.

What she—

She’s not sure she wants to know. She’s not sure she could bear the sight of a version of herself untouched by pain and fear. Would she even recognise her own face? 

Would that clean-water reflection want to look upon hers? Could it bear the sight of her?

There is no healing, she knows, in thinking about such things.

Only in what is and what might be: a future for herself that is cleaner than her past. A time, a place, a home where her waste-tainted waters can spill into the sea and become something new, reborn in the swirls of salt.

The one lesson the Scholar taught that she did learn: to take what comfort she can in what little she has, and not waste her days dreaming of things she will never, ever know.

And so she does that.

She holds it tight, the skin filled with fresh, clean water, the skin that still carries the sandalwood scent of a monk’s hands, the whisper of his kindness and purity, a touch without contact.

The comfort of knowing that he sees her. That he has transformed himself into something new, that he has remade his acts of kindness into something he doesn’t understand, all for her.

That he would keep his distance, that he would pour his touches into the only thing she can swallow down: water. That he would do all that, against all his own instincts, to soften hers.

It is more than she has ever known. It’s more than—

It is more than she’s ever let herself imagine.

To open herself up to the idea of kindness, of contact even from a distance...

To lie here, alone but not alone, clutching a waterskin that holds someone else’s fingerprints. A touch beyond touch, a gateway to—

To ‘one day’.

To thinking about it, maybe, being touched by these people who are her friends, of accepting contact and not immediately expecting it to transform into something terrible. To thinking about fingerprints not on a waterskin but on her own: a palm bracing her back, a thumb caressing her jaw, fingers wrapped around her pulse, and none of those things ending in blood or pain or death.

And her: accepting, welcoming, embracing. Allowing these touches to find her and not expecting...

Not flinching. Not rearing back. Not baring her teeth or balling her fists or reaching for a weapon.

It thrills her and terrifies her at the same time, to think of those things as something to strive for. A future, however distant. A horizon shimmering with hope, waiting for her staggering, stumbling steps to bring her there.

The idea that they — her companions, her _friends_ — might be waiting there too, arms outstretched to welcome her.

Unimaginable.

Today, at least, it is.

But tomorrow?

Next week, next month, next year?

Perhaps a little less.

And then less, and then less still.

And then—

And then, at last, something as clean and pure as the water in the skin.

It is a problem. This she knows.

Touch and trust, kindness and compassion, the fear of violence in all those things, quickening with every breath. Her body’s responses, the twists and tangles inside her mind, the memories that will not go away.

It is a problem, the things she feels when she looks at Pigsy. It is a problem, the things she thinks when she looks into the river and sees her own face and cannot fathom ever seeing anything but a monster.

It is a problem.

Here and now, it feels unscalable.

But if Tripitaka is to be believed...

No. If she is to believe in herself...

One day, it won’t be.

That, she thinks, is a quest she is not afraid to undertake.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so ends my last fic before the long-awaited second season.
> 
> Apologies and thanks for your patience to everyone who had to put up with me spamming the fandom tag with my less-than-conventional content the last couple of years. I hope S2 brings joy and inspiration to you all.


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